Kingsman and X-Men: First Class filmmaker Matthew Vaughn thinks Marvel needs to make less films

Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn is no stranger to bringing high-concept comic book shenanigans to the silver screen. Still, he wonders if there’s a point where poor decisions, shortcuts, and oversaturation could create a fatigue even Hollywood’s comic book movie boom can’t defeat. Speaking with ScreenRant at New York City-Comic-Con, Vaughn let his discontent about the current state of comic book cinema be known.

“I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero [genre] in the sense that, I do think, maybe we all need a little bit of time off from it,” Vaughn said. “Maybe someone will make something so great that we will get excited again… Superhero films are films. It’s a film that has superheroes in it. I think what happened was that they became superheroes, and the film part wasn’t that important.”

“When you’re making a superhero movie, you sort of have to work harder because you’ve got to make people believe it,” he continued. “That’s why ‘X-Men: First Class‘ was pretty grounded. We set it in the Cuban Missile Crisis; they had relatable human problems. And it wasn’t relying on the CG. I think CG’s fucked up everything as well, because you feel like you’re watching a video game. You’re not with the characters. Apart from ‘Guardians’… I still think Groot and the raccoon are fucking pieces of genius that I feel so much for them. So I’ll be intrigued. I think at least DC is under… I think James Gunn and Safran, they’ve got a good chance of popping, and hopefully [Kevin] Feige will go back to less is more and make less films and concentrate on making them great.”

While Vaughn thinks superhero movies could slow their role, he’s not condemning the genre entirely. Vaughn says he enjoyed DC’s The Flash, and is surprised it didn’t land better with audiences.

“What really freaked me out was that I really enjoyed The Flash,” Vaughn told ScreenRant. “I thought it was a really good film, right? And it died at the box office, right? And I’m like, ‘Wait, hold on, this is a good movie. What happened?’ And I don’t know whether that was superhero fatigue; you’ve just seen it done. So even now that we’ve made it well, there was some really, really complicated, hard and quite special, unique filmmaking in that film. Which I don’t think [Andy] Muschietti got enough credit for what they pulled off.”

I can think of a few things that could have sabotaged the success of The Flash, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. Unfortunately for DC, The Flash earned only $108 million at the domestic box office, labeling the long-gestating superhero flick dead on arrival. Was it the Ezra Miller factor? The questionable VFX? Who’s to say?

“I think there’s been so many bad superhero movies as well that it’s like the Western. You make so many then you get bored of the genre, not because the genre is bad but because the films are bad,” he added. “I was old enough, sadly, when ‘Batman and Robin’ came out, and it was terrible. I was a big Batman fan, and we were like, ‘Ah!’ And then superheroes stopped, and then they came back. Now, I’ll be intrigued to see how ‘The Marvels’ does.”

The outlook for The Marvels could be better, but Carol Danvers could surprise us. She’s done it before.

Do you agree with Matthew Vaughn about the current state of superhero cinema? The genre feels touch-and-go in recent years, with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania regarded as a disappointing launch for the MCU’s latest phase and both Secret Invasion and Loki Season 2 underwhelming on Disney+. Maybe Vaughn’s right? Do we need a break from superheroes on the silver screen? Let us know what you think in the comments below.