The self-respecting artist in also in a business designed to make money.RIP Film wrote: ↑Sat Sep 05, 2020 11:16 amEh, it does to me. To think that any self-respecting artist who's been given the opportunity and canvas Villeneuve has, would allow their vision to be molded in reaction to Marvel movies, unconsciously or not, is a bit much. Especially since his films have exhibited the same reflective quietude from the start, as with Enemy which came out around when the MCU was revving up. In fact, Villeneuve doesn't even strike me as a 'blockbuster director' as much as a director who's just been given a large budget. He hasn't grown into it and allowed it to shape and redefine him like it has a Christopher Nolan. You could cut his budgets in half and you'd probably get the same thing with less effects shots.
The idea that there's a reaction taking place to Marvel though isn't completely off; but I would wager it's happening with audiences and not Villeneuve. It's probable he has benefitted from superhero fatigue, or audiences wanting something deeper and more intellectual than Jurassic World.
Movies are not made in a bubble. Movies are pitched, greenlit, produced, marketed and released at a specific moment in time, you cannot ignore the reality you are releasing your product into. Of course, people are aware of MCU looming over the cinema landscape. Of course there is a reaction to it. Everyone from Scorsese to Admodovar is talking about it. They are talking about it because the MCU matters. The hold it has on the audience is undeniable. Just last year they put out the biggest movie of all time. It has been the dominant force in high earning cinema in the past decade worldwide.
So of course there is reaction to it from film-makers as well. WB's DC franchise post Nolan was explicitly a response to the MCU.
Influence is measured not just by the imitation of a subject but also by the reaction to it. And MCU is undoubtedly enormously influential that way. MCU has been stigmatized as a infatalized, productized, commercialized unhealthy cheeseburger of a movie product with bright colors, jokes and gags, fast action, peppy characters.
Movies are definitely being made as a reaction to that, to perhaps offer an alternative or counter programming or from a desire to be different and path breaking in your own way or to not be perceived as them, to have some measure or prestige and respectability.