Scene from Avengers: Infinity War, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo Photo: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios via AP
If anyone involved in Marvel films should have learned one lesson by now, it's this: Don't insult Martin Scorsese. The man generally considered America's greatest living director made his opinion of superhero franchise films and the like clear in his 2019 comments that “[they] aren't movies… the closest I can think of them, but Also well done are theme parks where the actors do the best they can under the circumstances.”
While many agreed with Scorsese as Marvel currently grapples with everything from its early commercial failures to the legal troubles faced by its star Jonathan Majors, some of the actors and directors who rose to fame through the company gone. their way of protecting the studio.
Step up Joe Russo: One half of the Russo brothers, the directors responsible for the mega-grossing final Avengers films: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. (Oh, Marvel loves its titles with a colon.) For reasons best known to himself, the younger of the two Russo brothers decided to post a video on social media poking fun at Scorsese, who enjoyed an unlikely but long-awaited career as a TikTok star late in his career. , thanks to a post created by his daughter Francesca, in which the legendary director tried to turn his dog Oscar into a star worthy of his name.
It was a funny joke, but Russo managed to ruin the joke with a harsh and rude response in which he, holding his own schnauzer dog, first posted on Instagram the phrase “looks like we have the same muse.” , before saying, “Oh look, he has a schnauzer! I love schnauzers. And his name is Oscar. That’s really cute,” before telling his dog pointedly. “Okay, come on, cashier.”
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A message posted by the Russo Brothers (@therussobrothers)
The point is that Scorsese may have received critical praise, but not the Russos, whose Avengers films have grossed nearly $5 billion in total at the box office. Box office returns have the advantage of publicity, which has caused an extremely negative reaction on social media, where Scorsese is revered and considered an unimpeachable genius.
Examples of comments included: “I guess The Gray Man is no longer director Joe Russo's most embarrassing thing”; “Let's be honest, Joe Russo is a rich asshole”; and, in contrast to the work of these two men, “Scorsese used his influence to cash his biggest check and conduct a jeremiad-like work on America's founding sin and the bottomless pit of human sin. Joe Russo used his success to take a photo of the inside of Tom Holland's anus.”
The Russo brothers' Instagram account could claim that they “make films for audiences,” but Joe's ill-advised and, moreover, unfunny attempt to put himself on the same level as Scorsese, whose virtuoso “Killers of Flowers” Moon” received rave reviews, although the box office was not at the level of “The Avengers”, brought nothing but disgrace.
The Russo brothers on the set of Captain America: Civil War
If this had been the only juvenile or ill-considered thing Rousseau ever said, or if Anthony had been innocent, then we might sigh, shake our heads at the bad joke, and move on to pastures new. However, buoyed by the success of the Avengers films, the directors apparently decided that they were the arbiters of all things cinematic, and thus made a point of offering unfounded observations.
In a 2022 interview with Variety that honored both men as “entertainer of the year,” they were in grand form. Announcing that they won't be able to return to work with Marvel until at least the end of the decade, so their dance card is completely full until then, Anthony said: “Things are changing quickly and we're really excited about that. We are futurists. We love new technologies. We love the energy it brings to our process, the opportunities it creates for our communication with the audience. Then we meet the market where it is at the moment. This has been our program from the very beginning, and it has served us very well.”
If this sounds more like the language of advertising than cinema, with its talk of “process” and “meeting the market,” then it is in keeping with Joe's earlier belief that the time-honored cinematic experience so beloved and championed by legions of filmmakers from Scorsese to Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg inevitably comes to an end and is replaced by something more individual. As he stated in an interview: “I was recently talking with the guys at Disney and they have the same philosophy: we are moving towards a digital future that will allow them to access their audience anywhere, anytime through any of their media.” ” resources.”
It's a deeply depressing idea: cinema as we know it has come to an end (and indeed, according to Joe, reached its peak in Endgame, which he calls “the pinnacle of that era of theatrical filmmaking… it will never happen again”). The situation is made worse by the sheer stunning mediocrity that the Russo brothers foisted upon the world after the massive success of the Avengers films. Whatever you think of the four films they've made with Marvel, of which perhaps the best is the sequel to the paranoid seventies Captain America thriller The Winter Soldier, they were at least cohesive and interesting exercises in escapism, thanks iron grip. almighty studio producer Kevin Feige.
Without such Feigian discipline, however, they were drawn into one dismal project after another. A failed attempt at gravitas occurred in the 2021 crime drama Cherry, which starred Spider-Man lead Tom Holland as a drug-addicted bank robber and featured the aforementioned shot of Holland's anus; Variety rightfully named the film the worst of the year.
There was the much-derided Netflix action movie The Gray Man, which starred Ryan Gosling as a rogue CIA agent on the run from Chris Evans' preening assassin; despite the top cast, it was nothing more than a Frankenstein's monster of stunts, ideas and even dialogue cobbled together from other, better films, and proof that even a $200 million budget can't stop something like this from looking cheap and formulaic.
Tom Hardy in the movie “Cherry” Photo: AP
The Russos, of course, got their start in television after George Clooney's unsuccessful 2002 comedy Welcome to Collinwood. They worked as directors and producers on the hugely popular series Arrested Development and Community, and at first it seemed like they brought that lighter, less reverential sensibility to the Marvel films they worked on. They were also keen to highlight their credentials as film buffs: Joe declared to this newspaper's Robbie Collin that “Truffaut is our favorite director. “Shoot the Pianist” is probably our favorite movie,” as they suggested its (to be fair, subtle) influence on “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
A few years later, they claimed that Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 existential classic Red Desert was a major visual influence on Avengers: Endgame. Say what you will about the Russo brothers, but they certainly played a good game. Perhaps this made enough people believe that they were, in fact, visionaries, and not just a couple of lucky hackers who got the biggest break imaginable.
And it's this ability to talk the talk rather than walk the walk that was on full display in their twisty spy thriller Citadel, which premiered on Amazon Prime earlier this year to widespread bewilderment. It's a rare show that manages to lose Stanley Tucci and Lesley Manville, but somehow the glossy but very boring and completely uninteresting show managed to do it.
Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas at The Citadel Photo: Prime Video
There were rumors of behind-the-scenes difficulties, with the original showrunners and the Russos parting ways due to “creative differences.” Not only was the exorbitantly expensive series commissioned for a second series (the first had a reported budget of $300 million, and looked like it cost a tenth of that), but the Russos would apparently exercise more creative control over it and will film several episodes. Only an actors' strike stands between sanity and production.
And if that wasn't enough for you, much more is promised or threatened. After all, they have to have something to keep them from making superhero sequels for the next seven or so years. A look at the projects they have planned for the next few years includes new television series based on the novels The Thomas Crown Affair and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as an adaptation of Walter Hill's seminal novel The Warriors.
Joe and Anthony Russo with the actors of the film “Avengers: Endgame”. Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney
There's also the dubious-sounding action thriller The Electric State, which is based on a graphic novel and tells the story of the relationship between an orphan girl, her robot companion, and an eccentric drifter. Naturally, it stars Chris Pratt – presumably as a drifter rather than a robot or an orphan girl – and, naturally, the film will premiere on Netflix next year. It's hard to get excited about this prospect.
If Hollywood were a fair place, the Russos would have been thanked for their adequate but hardly groundbreaking work on the Marvel films and allowed to return to their previous career working on television shows. Instead, it's the bottom line that speaks loudest, and they are now A-list directors, diligently issuing their stamp of approval on the most expensive B-movies ever made.
However, it is worrying that with the industry in crisis, it may be that directors like Scorsese will struggle to find financing for their very personal and high-profile films, and these are the kind of directors like Rousseau. who are being showered with money by streaming services to create a dystopian nightmare or “digital future” where endless images like “The Gray Man” are beamed into viewers’ eyes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We've all gathered to watch the final two Avengers movies, and this Thanos-level destruction of an industry is the price we're all going to pay. Where is Iron Man when you need him?
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