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.
I’m not sure I completely agree. Yes there’s always been silly popcorn movies and genuine, thoughful works of art, but the problem is that the movies that focus less on spectacle and more on story and characters, tend to barely scrape by at the box office.
People pretty much only go to the cinema to see big-budget spectacles nowadays, when back in the day you’d go see lots of different types of movies.
Oppenheimer was the exception to the rule. It was such a breath of fresh air because it was a serious drama with barely any spectacle, but people actually went to see it. I see it as a sign of changing times. Marvel movies are increasingly flopping, and people crave sincerity in cinema again. I have nothing against silly comic book movies, but I don’t want those to be the only type of movie I see.
Well at the same time, I just think that’s more indicative of the progress of technology relative to the progress of the modern cinema. My TV is now very good, and films are released onto home media quite a bit faster than, say, the 40-year gap between the release of Gone with the Wind and the development of the consumer VCR. If I want to watch an expensive piece of audio-visual spectacle while it’s still part of the zeitgeist, that’s a pretty good reason to catch it early on a massive screen with Owlsey Stanley’s Wall of Sound blaring from all four directions. If I’m going to watch a three hour long character-driven, thought-provoking masterpiece that makes me re-evaluate the world and my place in it, I’d like to be able to do that in private on my couch with a bowl of soup and a thermostat volume knob I control, and not be wrenched suddenly from the pastoral vistas of St. Radegund by the stranger two rows down ordering a Taco Bell off his phone while I’m trying to process my complex emotions. And the pandemic sure didn’t help much either. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for however much they’ve declined in recent years (and ignoring Guardians of the Galaxy III, which was far better than it had any right to be), the big-budget superhero blockbusters have been some of the few in recent memory to be able to consistently deliver on the visual spectacle to justify the day trip, the vice-grip on the public consciousness to demand seeing it right away, and, at least for a time, writing not so offensively dumb as to make it still possible to sit through. I think it’s less a sign of audiences becoming more concerned with spectacle than sincerity, and more a sign that people are being given more flexibility to engage with the medium at their own pace, and as a result the buzz around a given film doesn’t seem quite so pronounced as it isn’t all entirely done in unison. And while that does certainly hurt them at the box office, it’s not necessarily indicative that there isn’t a demand for them, just that people don’t have as much incentive to make a whole day trip out of one movie when they could just wait a few weeks and do it on their own terms. I don’t think it’s cinema that’s in a bad way, I think it’s just the cinema.
Of course, this fellow made much my same point quite a bit better and quite a bit sooner and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge it.
What is the alien truck fighting movie? I think Police academy and co. Are fine movies but comedies and dramas are fewer and farther between now. Especially for cinema release. For example Adam Sandlers movies are the modern equivalent of straight to dvd.
What is the alien truck fighting movie?
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, released a couple weeks before Oppenheimer.
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.
Honestly I’d say probably 80% of the movies I listed as “less-than” are actually super rad and I was kinda just hoping nobody would notice. But it sure seems like this guy would take issue with the pop music toy movie and Frankenstein beating up a werewolf and Michael Winslow making funny noises with his mouth, so, sometimes we stretch the truth.
I love Brian Cox but this is giving old man is mad at change. The masses want to be entertained. While art house films are loved by critics and film lovers, it doesn’t draw the billions of dollars type crowds.
I’m not catching where he’s coming off “mad” so to say. He’s saying that Cinema and TV have kind of swapped and that’s almost true here. Now I’m nowhere as near definitive in that stance that “it’s a bay way”, maybe it’s for the better for the two to swap for the time. But I think he’s got a point in that Cinema is just chasing the dollar and kind of left “art” for whatever that means behind.
I guess it just really depends on what a particular person feels that cinema’s purpose should be. If it’s just here to entertain, then it’s doing quite well at that, in fact this is likely the golden times of that. If it’s here to be an expression of art, yeah, it’s completely failed at that with the formulaic rehashing it’s slumped into.
Yep, if you actually read what he’s saying he seems to be pretty level-headed and even positive about it. More to the point, I don’t actually disagree with any of it. Cinema IS in crisis, the fact that event movies still make a ton of cash is masking that fact and prestige TV has absolutely replaced it as the place to do compelling straight-up drama.
This isn’t a rant, it’s a fairly sharp observation from a smart person in the thick of it all. I don’t presume to have a better read on the film and TV industry than Brian Cox, of all people. Turns out Hannibal Lecter/Logan Roy/William Striker knows the business he’s been working successfully for sixty years, go figure.
I can’t say I totally blame him. I’m only 31, and I’m already feeling a little irked about some of the ways this world has changed. And ya, I’m pretty tired of super hero movies anymore. However, I’m really looking forward to watching Deadpool and Wolverine on the big screen together. Just gotta find a babysitter first. 😂
You think Wolverine is the best an actor like Jackman can do? Otherwise Cox has a point.
I don’t think he is saying party time shouldn’t be a thing. But he is saying actors are only doing party time. When an actor as good as Jackman is just doing campy, easy entertainment you got to admit something is being lost.
I get what he’s saying. Quality of TV shows and televisions themselves have been going up, whereas theaters are not filling the seats like they used to. People are only going to see the blockbusters and leaving the thoughtfully paces stuff for home viewing. And obviously, studios are gonna play to the fan service
If a film is 90% faces of people talking, it belongs on a face-sized screen. If it’s mostly people doing things that are reasonably done in a living room, it belongs in my living room. Now, I’m going to have to wait and see D&W in my home too, because of family constraints. And I’m going to have to play it at a reasonable volume, with captions. But it belongs on a big screen, in a big theater, with big noise. And big popcorn. Hugh didn’t spend all that effort getting hugely jacked again for nothing, and Ryan’s antics need elbow room.
Especially with the prices of movies, i wanna go to a movie that i know will blow my socks off. The thoughtful ones i honestly prefer for home viewing because i decide the atmosphere and can pause if i need to take a moment. Plus thoughtful, for me, works better in longform TV and bombastic crazy works better as movies. There are exceptions of course.
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Most cinemas are shitty and you have to listen to idiots talk and fart
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Life has gotten harder for people, and movies are becoming more and more fantasy escapes. People have enough shit day to day, I’m not going to watch a two hour heart stringer that’ll make me feel like shit
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Price. Shit is just too expensive. Oh you have kids? Get ready to drop 100 $ to watch this animated dog run around for 2h…
It’s down to the technological improvements in TVs and increase in the expense of going to the movies (relatively speaking).
There used to be a very wide separation of resolution between SD CRT TVs and seeing a film in a cinema. Now you can have a fairly large 4K TV and have something very close to a cinema experience at home.
And on the the other end, with technologies like digital cameras, “The Volume” and CGI in general, it’s becoming less expensive to put movie quality production values within reach for TV shows. If you can re-use the same CGI models used previously the costs go down. Sure it costs money to make a CGI Star Destroyer or a robot, or a city backdrop or whatever, but once it’s done it can be re-used over and over again.
This all adds up to people only going to theaters for event type movies where people will dress up in costumes and have a party like atmosphere. As engaging as it may be to see a story about some rich people squabble over getting a lot of inheritance, it’s not something that you need to go to a cinema to experience.
