Exorcist Director Complains Cinema Is Now All About Superheroes

“Films used to be rooted in gravity. They were about real people doing real things,” Yahoo! News quotes Friedkin as saying at the Champs-Elysees Film Festival in Paris.

Today, he said, “cinema is all about Batman, Superman, Iron Man, Avengers, Hunger Games in America: all kinds of stuff that I have no interest in seeing at all.”

He acknowledged that the rise of effects-driven films is likely a big part of why his more grounded, gritty filmmaking style went out of fashion around the time Star Wars and Superman: The Movie were released in the late ’70s.

Friedkin is one of a number of filmmakers who have complained about superhero films in recent months, with many using the phrase simply to reflect big-budget, CGI-driven blockbusters in general as much as superheroes in specific.

Friedkin says that filmmakers looking to craft storytelling with a unique voice may do better to turn to television, where “You develop character at a greater length and the story is more complex and deeper than cinema.”