While Marvel prepares to bring its highly-anticipatedAvengers: Infinity War, filmmakerJames Camerontook an unexpected swipe at the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the weekend. The filmmaker was promoting his new AMC seriesAMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, debuting on April 30, when he was asked about his thoughts on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the filmmaker stated that he does enjoy the Marvel movies, he hopes that “Avenger fatigue” will set in soon because he thinks other stories should be told.
“I’m hoping we’ll start gettingAvengerfatigue here pretty soon. Not that I don’t love the movies. It’s just, come on guys, there are other stories to tell besides hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process. It’s like, oy!”
It doesn’t seem likely that this “Avengersfatigue” will set in anytime soon. The latest box office projections forAvengers: Infinity Warput its opening weekend between $235 million and $255 million. On the low end, that would be good enough for the second highest debut of all time, and if it reaches or eclipses the high end of those projections, it will beat the $247.9 million record set byStar Wars: The Force Awakens. With those kind of numbers, audiences certainly don’t seem to be “fatigued” by this franchise one bit. The filmmaker was also asked about the future of sci-fi, where he brought up one of the MCU movies,Guardians of the Galaxy, as an example of a fun sci-fi movie, adding that since he hasn’t put a movie or TV show out in quite some time, he might be “out of touch.”
“I would say I don’t have a good sense, my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist today because I haven’t had a TV show or movie out recently. So I don’t know where tastes are going in respect to science fiction. We can see the market drives us to a sort of science fiction now thats either completely escapist and doesn’t require a technical consultant. An example of that would beGuardians of the Galaxy. It’s just fun. We don’t care how those spaceships work or any of that stuff works. And then you have scientifically responsible science fiction likeThe MartianorInterstellar.”
It remains to be seen if anyone at Marvel, such as Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, will react to James Cameron’s comments, but in the grand scheme of things, Marvel has more important things to worry about like the opening ofAvengers: Infinity Warand the upcomingAnt-Man and the Wasp, which hits theaters on July 6. Marvel has already had one huge hit for the year withBlack Panther, which is easily the biggest movie of the year with a massive $202 million opening, $681 million domestic and $1.3 billion worldwide. You can head on over toIndieWirefor more from James Cameron, including details on his fourAvatarsequels that are currently filming.
