Mark Ruffalo Says Marvel Movies Do Move Audiences, Suggests Martin Scorsese Starts His Own National Film Endowment

As another day goes by, another member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe family offers their thoughts on Martin Scorsese's views on superhero films, with Mark Ruffalo responding to the filmmaker's position in an editorial he recently wrote by pointing out the emotional impact Marvel films have on audiences. When speaking with BBC Cinematic's Sam Asi, the actor not only spoke to the emotional effectiveness of the MCU, but also championed some of the comments Scorsese made about financially successful endeavors dictating the landscape of cinema, pushing for the director to help establish a national endowment that could help support more ambitious endeavors and earn them funding.

"I would invite him to come and sit in one of those movies with an audience because it does move them," Ruffalo shared about Scorsese's remarks regarding audiences being moved by cinema. "I've not been in a movie where I've seen more people crying in the end of the movie and screaming and yelling and being affected as I have in those."

In his op-ed for The New York Times, Scorsese expressed his frustrations that big-budget blockbusters of all kinds have dominated theaters, preventing films like his latest, The Irishman, and other smaller-scale endeavors, from being valued as highly as comic book films. The reaction is that features that filmmakers craft with the intention of sharing on the big screen are relegated to streaming services.

Ruffalo largely agreed with Scorsese's points about highlighting more diverse stories, noting that such projects deserve recognition on a national level.

"If we're living in a world where economics are how we measure the value of a society, then, yeah, whoever makes the biggest thing is going to dominate it," the actor expressed. "And they're gonna try and keep making that again and again. In that article, he said something really interesting and I wish he took it all the way. He said, 'I'm not suggesting that we subsidize films,' but that's exactly what he's suggesting. We should have a national endowment of the arts that gives money to another kind of cinema and does support another kind of cinema. If you're working in the milieu of, 'I'm gonna try and make a movie that has economic success,' which he does, too, by the way, then how can you complain about that system when you're not on top of that system?"

He added, "I'd love to see Marty create a national film endowment, and he could do this, that lets young, new talent come in that isn't just driven by the marketplace but driven by the precepts of art, that would be amazing. But that's really at the crux of this conversation, I think."

The Irishman is set to land on Netflix on November 27th.

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