Brian Cox thinks cinema is “in a very bad way,” with the Marvel and DC Universes partly to blame.
The legendary actor of stage and screen – who most recently garnered critical acclaim for his award-winning role in HBO’s Succession – spoke at an Edinburgh International Film Festival panel on Saturday. When asked about the recent successes of globally popular TV shows, Cox cited the latest MCU installment Deadpool & Wolverine as a great example of cinematic “party time”.
“What’s happened is that television is doing what cinema used to do,” Cox told the audience of television’s originality. “I think cinema is in a very bad way. I think it’s lost its place because of, partly, the grandiose element between Marvel, DC and all of that. And I think it’s beginning to implode, actually. You’re kind of losing the plot.”
He discussed Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman of Deadpool & Wolverine while referencing how films are “making a lot of money that’ll make everybody happy, but in terms of the work, it becomes diluted afterwards. You’re getting the same old… I mean, I’ve done those kind of [projects].”
Cox starred as William Stryker Jr. in X2: X-Men United (a military scientist who persuades Logan to become Wolverine), and admittedly said he “forgets” about the fact he “created” Wolverine. “Deadpool meets the guy… Wolverine, who I created, but I’ve forgotten. Actually,” he jokes, “When those films are on, there’s always a bit of me [as Stryker] and they never pay me any money.”
“So it’s just become a party time for certain actors to do this stuff,” Cox added. “When you know that Hugh Jackman can do a bit more, Ryan Reynolds… but it’s because they go down that road and it’s box office. They make a lot of money. You can’t knock it.”
Television is pulling ahead, he continued, with incredible shows like Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and Netflix’s Ripley, starring Andrew Scott. “There’s so many [shows] and you’ve got the honor of telling the story over a period of time.” The actor said movies of his childhood such as On the Waterfront are what made him want to “be the actor I’ve become,” but it’s partially eradicated.
I dunno, man. I don’t think you can say “cinema was better in the fifites when there weren’t all these cheap action movies and creature features and cash-grab sequels” as though On the Waterfront didn’t come out within three weeks of a movie about giant radioactive ants and the fifth remake of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, sure, last year people were double-fisting a sprawling biopic about the man that flung the world irreversibly into the atomic age and a movie about singing plastic dolls, and finishing it off with a talking alien truck fighting a robot monkey… just like how eighty years ago Casablanca came out the same year as The Invisible Man’s Revenge and House of Frankenstein, sixty years ago people were just coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and turning right back around to go watch Charlton Heston punch a guy in a gorilla suit, forty years ago we got Amadeus hot on the heels of Police Academy and The Search for Spock, and nine years ago Spotlight and The Revenant were running trailers at the same time as Minions and Adam Sandler’s Pixels. This is not a new phenomenon, the past only looks better because nobody talks about the mediocre movies from that era anymore. And I’m not even gonna touch the implication that mass-appeal entertainment is somehow devoid of merit with a twenty-foot pole, that’s a whole other can of worms.
And even barring that, I really don’t think you get to say “TV is doing cinema better than cinema these days” as though for every Chernobyl or Succession there aren’t eight NCIS spinoffs, three Big Bang Theory prequels, a Celebrity Golden Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and - guess what, bucko - a show with a bunch of superheroes running around punching each other in the dicks, or whatever. The ratio of “high art” to “party time” is damn near identical, the movies just have a bigger ad budget.
So in the end, it seems all you’ve got left here is a guy starting a conversation about a new, topical thing and using that to segue into talking about a thing he made last year and how it’s so much better than new popular thing, and you should watch that instead. Thanks, Brian, super glad we had this talk.
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I guess I’m gonna feel real silly if I ever get around to watching Deadpool & Wolverine and end up agreeing with this guy.
Don’t worry, Deadpool & Wolverine is the best superhero movie for comic fans since Logan
Speaking of Amadeus, Mozart wrote a song called Lick my Ass that was covered by Jack White and ICP. we’ve always loved trash.
points silently to gidget, herbie and fckn elvis movies
Yeah, I mean, jeez, Elvis spends the entire middle of the 20th century taking beach vacations and playing cowboy on Paramount’s dime, raking in 3-4 million apiece (which was quite a lot back then) with half a script stapled to either end of an ad for his next record, and somehow that’s the golden era of Hollywood, but Hugh Jackman pretends to have an adamantium skeleton for the first time in seven years and suddenly culture’s being rotted from the inside-out by a new, omnipresent trend of performers wasting their talents goofing off for the frothing masses. Simple fact of the matter is cinema has been prioritizing screwing around with the audience over the illusion of artistic integrity since 1903 and anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something.