Christopher Walken weighs in on the ongoing debate surrounding Marvel and the MCU. Walken is one of the most recognizable actors working in Hollywood today, with a career dating back to the 1950s. The actor is best known for his roles in movies like The Deer Hunter and Catch Me If You Can, and most recently was the subject of widespread acclaim for his role as Burt on the Apple TV+ show Severance. Walken was also recently cast in Denis Villeneuve's highly anticipated Dune: Part Two, expected to play the role of Emperor Shaddam IV.
Despite his long and varied career, Walken has yet to appear in a Marvel film. The MCU as it exists today, which can largely be traced back to 2008's Iron Man, has been the subject of much debate in the Hollywood community. The argument was pushed into the limelight in 2019, when iconic director Martin Scorsese said that Marvel films weren't cinema, and that they were more akin to "theme parks." Many actors and directors have since weighed in on the argument, including the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, who agreed with Scorsese's sentiment, and Nick Fury actor Samuel L. Jackson, who defended Marvel movies as a valid form of art.
In a new interview with The Sydney Morning Herald to promote his latest show, The Outlaws, Walken joins the ongoing debate around Marvel movies. The actor explains that, with the huge budgets for MCU films, a dozen smaller movies could be made. Walken also talks about the state of the movie industry more generally, lamenting that smaller movies no longer have a place in movie theaters and that only large tentpole films get the theatrical release treatment. Check out Walken's full comment below:
Nobody’s asked me to do a Marvel! But I think it’s too bad that with a movie that costs $200 million to make, you know, dozens of smaller movies could be made for that money. And then it’s too bad that if you make a movie now, it’s unlikely to be seen in a [cinema] unless it’s one of those big ones. The smaller movies more likely go straight to the small screen.
The debate surrounding Marvel movies is evidently polarizing, even to well-known folks in Hollywood, but Walken's comment demonstrates that the argument against Marvel and the MCU and can generally be broken into two separate ideas. While the actor's opinion echoes Scorsese's in some ways, he notably doesn't question the validity of Marvel movies as art, and instead focuses on the downsides to the films' gargantuan budgets and the state of the industry as a whole.
Taking issue with MCU films being considered "cinema" or a valid form of art has sparked reasonable retorts from Jackson and even WandaVision star Elizabeth Olsen, but there's no denying that the movie landscape of today is vastly different than the one that existed when the first Iron Man was released. While many audiences would surely love to see smaller, auteur-driven films make a comeback in theaters, MCU movies like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home are successfully getting audiences back into cinemas at a crucial time in movie theater history. It remains to be seen what the future holds for movies and if Walken will get his wish for smaller films to make a comeback, but for the time being, Marvel movies are definitely here to stay.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
