Jennifer Aniston Just Took A Major Shot At Marvel Movies
Mighty Marvel may be dominating pop culture, but not everyone is feeling the love.
In a recent conversation with Variety, Jennifer Aniston — star of the beloved sitcom Friends and the upcoming Apple TV+ series The Morning Show — lamented what she saw as a dearth of cinematic choices due to the popularity of comic book movies.
It was a rather hard segue in an interview which had, up until that point, been focused on The Morning Show and how it had been shaped, in part, by the #MeToo movement and the downfall of such once-powerful Hollywood players as Harvey Weinstein. Aniston was asked a simple question about what prompted her return to television fifteen years after shooting her last episode of Friends, and in her response, she veered quickly from marveling about all of the awesome choices available to viewers since the advent of streaming to... well, not marveling about Marvel.
"It wasn't until the last couple of years when these streaming services were just sort of exploding with this amount of quality that I actually started to think, 'Wow, that's better than what I just did,'" the actress said. "And then you're seeing what's available out there, and it's just diminishing and diminishing in terms of, it's big Marvel movies. Or things that I'm not just asked to do... [I'm not] really that interested in living in [front of] a green screen."
Well, we suppose it's kind of a bummer when you're an actress who is well-known for starring on one of the most popular sitcoms in the history of television, and you then find that your agent is always trying to talk you into taking roles in these silly comic book pictures, where you'll be forced to report to work and pretend to talk to a gun-toting raccoon all day. The interviewer responded to this umprompted diss by noting how much Hollywood has changed in recent years, to which Aniston replied by expressing her yearning for the golden age of... '80s and '90s rom-coms.
"It's changed so much. I think we would so love to have the era of Meg Ryan come back," she said, failing to clarify just who she meant by we. "I just think it would be nice to go into a movie theater, sit cozy. I think we should have a resurgence. Let's get the Terms of Endearment back out there. You know, Heaven Can Wait, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Goodbye Girl."
We would be remiss not to point out that two of things are decidedly not like the others, and that to wantonly lump the brilliantly subversive works of Mel Brooks in with cinematic soft-serve like Heaven Can Wait and The Goodbye Girl is not helping Aniston's credibility on this matter. It seems to have become somewhat fashionable to trash Marvel as of late, however — so, while it might seem a little out of left field for Aniston to cite all of these endless freakin' Marvel movies as the reason why she's choosing to continue working in television, she's certainly not alone in feeling that the trend has become a bit obtrusive.
Jennifer Aniston isn't the only celebrity to trash Marvel movies
Most recently, Martin Scorsese — arguably the greatest living film director — made headlines for blasting comic book movies in general in far more direct, jaw-droppingly harsh fashion. "That's not cinema," the filmmaker stated flatly when asked if he had kept up with the latest releases in the superhero genre. "Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."
Scorsese isn't the only acclaimed filmmaker to make the dubious comparison between comic book films and theme parks. In a 2018 conversation with Radio Times magazine, Jodie Foster unloaded on the entirety of the superhero genre, going so far as to say that such films pollute the cinematic landscape in much the same way that poor environmental practices pollute the planet.
"Going to the movies has become like a theme park," Foster said. "Studios making bad content in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking — you get the best return right now, but you wreck the earth. It's ruining the viewing habits of the American population, and then ultimately, the rest of the world." (via Daily Mail)
Of course, taking shots at comic book flicks is nothing new; within the last decade or so, the likes of Roland Emmerich, David Cronenberg, Mel Gibson, Rose McGowan, and more have all gone out of their way to drag the genre through the mud. The backlash, however, does appear to be picking up a little steam; perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Avengers: Endgame recently became the highest-grossing film of all time, or that the entire world briefly lost their minds when Spider-Man was temporarily evicted from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or that Joker has become the most talked-about film of the fall and began generating Oscar buzz for its star, Joaquin Phoenix, well before it was even released.
We submit, however, that a sizable market for non-comic book fare still exists, and that if actors like Aniston and filmmakers like Scorsese don't want to work in the genre, nobody is going to force them to. Heck, we hear that Scorsese just made his best film in years; it's called The Irishman, and it's not even about a guy flying around in a green suit, defeating his enemies by pelting them with explosive shamrocks.