Martin Scorsese is right about Marvel films – they are formulaic fairground rides, not cinema

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “That’s not cinema,” observed Marty in an interview with Empire last week, on the subject of Marvel movies. Amusingly, what one might consider “real” cinema according to Scorsese’s definition – a cinema that tells stories to mine the human psyche, say – has now been crossed with the franchise film. “In point of fact,” he wrote, “the qualitative differences between the two are so obscure as to barely bear mentioning; the most pertinent is that F Gary Gray’s Men in Black movie is a good hour shorter than the Russo brothers’ all-star superhero revue, so you can be back out on to the street and getting on with your life a little sooner.” Pinkerton went on to say, “I have an increasingly compelling sense that these things are not movies: they’re content, they’re IP, they’re brand-management exercises.” Faced with this sort of invective, stars from the Marvel franchise have offered hilariously tepid clapbacks. Robert Downey Jr, invited by Howard Stern to respond to the proposition that these things aren’t movies, contributed: “I mean, it plays in theatres.” Samuel L Jackson, meanwhile, opined: “Films are films.” Quite.