Kingsman: The Secret Service and X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn thinks the world could maybe use a break from superhero movies.
Speaking with Screen Rant at New York Comic Con, Vaughn commented on the current state of the superhero genre and why he thinks Hollywood taking “a little bit of time off” from making more of them could prove to be beneficial.
“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,” he said. “Maybe someone will make something so great that we will get excited again and remind everybody that just having identical ways of making superheroes… 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.”
Watch Video : Kingsman: The Secret Service and X-Men
After producing a number of Guy Ritchie films like 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch, Vaughn made his directorial debut in 2004 with Layer Cake starring Daniel Craig. He was then hired to direct 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand but ultimately left the project before it began filming.
Watch Video : 2006’s X-Men
After making Stardust in 2007, Vaughn directed 2010’s Kick-Ass, 2011’s X-Men: First Class, 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and 2021’s The King’s Man.
Vaughn’s next project is a spy thriller titled Argylle, which stars Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Due Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sofia Boutella.
“Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World franchise) is Elly Conway, the reclusive author of a series of best-selling espionage novels, whose idea of bliss is a night at home with her computer and her cat, Alfie,” the synopsis reads. “But when the plots of Elly’s fictional books—which center on secret agent Argylle and his mission to unravel a global spy syndicate—begin to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, quiet evenings at home become a thing of the past,” says the synopsis. “Accompanied by Aiden (Oscar winner Sam Rockwell), a cat-allergic spy, Elly (carrying Alfie in her backpack) races across the world to stay one step ahead of the killers as the line between Elly’s fictional world and her real one begins to blur.”
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Watch Video : Kingsman: The Golden Circle
It’s true that since Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the X-Men franchise, and Blade in the early 2000s, superhero films have only gotten more and more prevalent, with two or three blockbusters from Marvel and DC premiering every year. Now, Vaughn says, “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.” He had this advice to offer: “When you’re making a superhero movie, you sort of have to work harder because you’ve got to make people believe it. That’s why X-Men: First Class was pretty grounded. We set it in the Cuban Missile Crisis; they had relatable human problems.”
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Okay... well... the Cuban Missile Crises is probably not the most relatable of problems that people could be dealing with, but we get what he means: grounded, real-world problems, like international incidents that almost incite nuclear war. That’s the kind of focused storytelling that’s really missing from Marvel these days. It’s a hilariously odd take, but the rest of Vaughn’s response is fairly understandable. Make less superhero films better, with more practical effects and with characters people care about. Seems easy enough to me.
Watch Video : X-Men: First Class
Argylle will have a full theatrical release on Feb. 2, 2024. The Apple TV+ streaming release date is unannounced.
Finally, Vaughn also acknowledged that there had been a ton of “bad superhero movies” prior to the boom of the MCU, so he’s curious to see where things go from here.
“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.”
Watch Video : Argylle