Chris Hemsworth Gets Bothered by Critics of Marvel Films

Australian actor Chris Hemsworth said he’s not happy with the criticism that superhero movies have received, especially from well-respected directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

“It felt harsh, and it bothers me, especially from heroes. It was an eye-roll for me, people bashing the superhero space,” the 40-year-old “Thor” actor said during a recently published interview with U.K.-based outlet The Times.

Hemsworth went on to point out how even industry greats have failures. “Those guys had films that didn’t work too — we all have. When they talked about what was wrong with superheroes, I thought, cool, tell that to the billions who watch them. Were they all wrong?” he added.

“Cinema-going did not change because of superheroes, but because of smartphones and social media. Superhero films actually kept people in the cinemas during that transition, and now people are coming back. So they deserve a little more appreciation,” Hemsworth said.

Scorsese authored an op-ed published in the New York Times in 2019 titled “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.”

“There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema,” the “Goodfellas” director wrote in the piece. “They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.”

He added, “For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.”

Coppola, director of “The Godfather,” agreed with that assessment. He sparked controversy in October 2019 when he said, “When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right, because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”

Hemsworth also told The Times he’s unhappy with actors who blame the genre for their failures.

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“It’s, like, ‘They’re films that are successful — put me in one. Oh, mine didn’t work? I’ll bash them,’” he said. “Look, I grew up on a soap opera. And it used to bother me when actors would later talk about the show with guilt or shame. Humility goes a long way. One of the older actors on ‘Home and Away’ said, ‘We don’t get paid to make the good lines sound good, but to make the bad ones work.’ That stuck with me.”

He continued, “But hey, it’s all a lesson. And if I ever went back to [‘Thor’] I’d wonder how we could change it again. But there is a superhero curse in the sense you get pigeonholed, and I’ve felt a little hamstrung with what I could do, so [I] desperately wanted something to scare the s*** out of me. And ‘Furiosa’ did.”

Hemsworth will appear next in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” premiering May 24.

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