"Logan" director, James Mangold, on "Tentpole" Superhero Movies: "Bloated exercises, they are two-hour trailers for another movie they are going to sell you in two years"


So now he thinks he's all cool because he made an R-rated superhero movie that actually rocked. Ok, fine. I agree with most of what he is saying actually and I'm impressed with the fact that he admits "Logan" has some third acts flaws. 

 I also do agree that there, and always will be, exceptions in the ongoing Marvel and DC onslaught: "Iron Man," "Guardians of the Galaxy," "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," "Iron Man 3," "The Dark Knight Trilogy" and, of course, "Logan." 

 Here are some of the more fascinating blurbs Magnold had to say in this fascinating podcast interview for "The Director's Cut" :

“Everyone is doing press so often, they can’t say what they feel and they are just selling, but the fact is the unspoken feeling is that this is a very weird trajectory we’re on. Spending more and more. Less is coming back in a kind of relative basis and the movies aren’t as good. I think Marvel is part of it and I’m not just talking about Fox mimicking it. If I’m going to insult movies I’m going to do it with a big broom. This is endemic, if you’re just going to use Marvel’s grosses and somehow make their movies free of this kind of criticism that’s not fair.” 
“Tentpole movies in general … they are not movies, generally. They are bloated exercises in two-hour trailers for another movie they are going to sell you in two years. There are so many characters that each character gets an arc of about six-and-a-half minutes at best, and I’m not exaggerating. You take 120 minutes, you take 45 of it for action, what are you left with, divide it by six characters, you have the character arc of Elmer Fudd in a Warner Brothers cartoon. That formula is empty for me.” 
“There have been some wonderful movies made in the last 10 years. ‘Guardians of The Galaxy,’ the first ‘Iron Man,’ but they each had a personality of a filmmaker, but the collective world they’ve spawned is a little repetitive.“
“There’s shit blowing up and exploding and soundtrack and Dolby Atmos up the wazoo and my eyes are rolling up in my head,” I kinda feel like Malcolm McDowell in ‘[A] Clockwork Orange,’ or I feel like I don’t know what’s going on, but I do not care and my system is shutting down. Remember you went over to a friends house when you were younger and they thought this album was so great and they played it really loud and it’s terrible and you’re listening and they want it really loud and so it is, but there’s nothing speaking to you.”
“….the thing that the studio thought would be the most appealing to fans, [that third act], you felt was the thing that was most disengaging. And the first 2/3rds of the movie that the studio was most worried about— I thought I was making a War Kong-Wai movie with Wolverine— they were thinking, ‘When is this thing going to get on track and we’ll have a big giant robot?’ And [those 2/3rds] was what was playing [best] to the audiences.”
“I did not want the X23 from the comics who was 18-25…mostly because I felt like it would feel like one of those CW show with all the young, beautiful people as superheroes. I wanted a daughter, like in ‘Paper Moon’ or ‘The Bad News Bears.’ I did not want the hot, sassy young thing, plus the outfits she wears in later years are ludicrous.”
Much thanks to The Playlist for transcribing