Francis Ford Coppola says that Marvel Studios is ruining studio films such as Dune and No Time To Die. Aside from superhero films, there's a handful of other flicks that were released in 2021 that ultimately became critic and fan favorites. The list includes Denis Villeneuve's Dune for Warner Bros. and Cary Fukunaga's James Bond film, No Time To Die. Despite getting generally positive reviews, Coppola says that cites some of his problems with them and he chalks those issues to the existence of the MCU.

On the heels of Martin Scorsese's scathing remarks against Marvel movies in 2019, Coppola joined the conversation to back his fellow Italian-American filmmaker. The Godfather director echoed Scorsese's previous sentiments about the MCU not being cinema. In fact, he even took it one step further, calling the franchise "despicable." Since then, the conversation has been a favorite topic among fans and even industry people, with folks directly involved in making these films chiming in. The commotion died down for a while until recently, when Ridley Scott and Ronald Emmerich revived it by essentially sharing Scorsese and Coppola's thoughts.

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Now, Coppola is expanding on his criticism of Marvel films. In an interview with GQ, the acclaimed filmmaker says that the MCU movies are all pretty much the same, something that he previously touched on. But, he also adds that he believes that because of how generic the franchise is, it's indirectly ruining other studio movies, citing both Dune and No Time To Die's action set pieces as supposedly being too similar. Read Coppola's full quote below:

“There used to be studio films. Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different. Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by…Gary? Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they're going to justify their budget. And that's the good films, and the talented filmmakers.”

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Coppola's recent comments are multi-layered, and there's a lot to unpack from it. His first point isn't exactly new and not without merit. One of the most prevalent criticisms about the MCU is that it's formulaic; films are typically structured the same, and all of them end in a massive battle. But, it's something that the franchise appears to be actively addressing. In Phase 4, they've become bolder in their creative choices with projects such as WandaVision and Eternals. It's the second half of Coppola's quote that's confusing. He pins his problems with Dune and No Time To Die supposedly having similar action sequences on Marvel Studios, but aside from both having big set pieces, many would argue that Villeneuve and Fukunaga's movies are quite different from each other. And while they do have fight scenes, they make sense since they are action-adventure flicks.

Marvel films have flaws, and they're not for everyone. But despite their issues, the MCU is good at one thing, and that's engaging its viewers to the point that they're invested enough to keep coming back for more. Admittedly, their rise has made it difficult for other smaller movies or those that aren't in the superhero sandbox, like Dune or No Time To Die, to compete at the box office. Unfortunately, vilifying the franchise isn't going to fix this issue. If anything, Stellan Skarsgård explained it best when he said that there's a bigger issue here than just Marvel films dominating, and to fix it, people need to better examine the overall status of the industry.

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Source: GQ

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