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Martin Scorsese, your frequent collaborator, has been in the news lately for saying that Marvel movies aren't cinema and upsetting a whole lot of people in the process. Do you have the same opinion?
No, they are cinema. So is that cat video on YouTube, it’s cinema. It is kind of surprising that what we used to regard as adolescent entertainment, comic books for teenagers, has become the dominant genre economically. Each generation is informed, and informed by literature, or informed by theater, or informed by live television, or informed by film school. Now we have a generation that's been informed by video games and manga. It’s not that the filmmakers have changed, it's that the audiences have changed. And when the audiences don't want serious movies, it's very, very hard to make one. When they do, when they ask you, "What should I think about women's lib, gay rights, racial situations, economic inequality?" and the audience is interested in hearing about these issues, well then you can make those movies. And we have. Particularly in the fifties, and sixties, and seventies, we're making them one or two a week about social issues. And they were financially successful because audiences wanted them. Then something changed in the culture, the center dropped out. Those movies are still being made, but they're not in the center of the conversation anymore.
What do you think changed?
Well, it happened all across the board. There’s no Walter Cronkite, there’s no Johnny Carson, and there's no Hollywood studio movies. The mass center has gone. What happens then is people retreat to the periphery. So you have the Comic-Con world, or you have the X or Y, Z world, and it's very hard to bring these people together again. That has been lost culturally. It's not going to ever come back."