Tom Holland, Kevin Feige, Amy Pascal & Tom Rothman Refute Remarks About Superhero Movies Not Being Oscar Worthy

The debate whether or not superhero movies are legitimate cinema has been raging for about as long as Hollywood has been trying to adapt comic books for the big screen. Well, the latest iteration of that old debate got sparked by none other than Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, who st off a firestorm in 2019 when he stated that Marvel movies aren't what he considers cinema. Well, now the latest Marvel movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home is out, and not only is it bringing the box office back to life – it's also sparking a discussion of whether or not it's an award-worthy achievement. 

Right now, Spider-Man: No Way Home is on track to make a billion dollars in its first week of release and holds a Rotten Tomatoes score (94%) that's on par or above any of the current crop of award season hopefuls, including acclaimed hits like Spielberg's West Side Story (94%) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza (92%), or early buzz-generators like King Richard (91%) and Belfast (86%). So if No Way Home is getting both high acclaim and high box office returns, is it not a perfect synthesis of blockbuster entertainment and cinema? 

Some cinephiles would certainly take up arms at the notion that a Spider-Man movie belongs in the same discussion as Oscar winners. However the team behind Spider-Man: No Way Home – including star Tom Holland, producer Amy Pascal, and Sony Pictures head Tom Rothman – have their own rebuttals to that notion: 

"You can ask [Martin] Scorsese 'Would you want to make a Marvel movie?' But he doesn't know what it's like because he's never made one," Tom Holland said to THR. "I've made Marvel movies and I've also made movies that have been in the conversation in the world of the Oscars, and the only difference, really, is one is much more expensive than the other. But the way I break down the character, the way the director etches out the arc of the story and characters — it's all the same, just done on a different scale. So I do think they're real art."

Holland also added that "When you're making these films, you know that good or bad, millions of people will see them, whereas when you're making a small indie film, if it's not very good no one will watch it, so it comes with different levels of pressure. I mean, you can also ask Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey Jr. or Scarlett Johansson — people who have made the kinds of movies that are 'Oscar-worthy' and also made superhero movies — and they will tell you that they're the same, just on a different scale. And there's less Spandex in 'Oscar movies.'"

Holland is being generous there: plenty of Oscar-winning movies have featured people rocking the spandex – just ask the casts of Avatar and/or Rocky. 

Amy Pascal jumped in, saying that "Just because they're a certain kind of genre doesn't mean they're not quality movies. We all got in this business to make movies that people want to see, that make people feel things, and I think this movie legitimately does that."

Tom Rothman was actually one of the top execs at Fox when James Cameron brought back a billion dollars and armfuls of Oscars for both Titanic and Avatar, so he knows from experience how commercial success and awards acclaim can go hand-and-hand:

"Quality commerciality is really hard to do. No Way Home is superb filmmaking. And this is what the Academy needs to stay connected to." Rothman said. As an added flex he reminds people that in addition to making billion-dollar blockbusters, he's also the man behind one of the most sucessful indie movie ventures out there: "I'm Mr. Fox Searchlight, right? I love art films! I think it's fabulous that art films are now recognized [at the Oscars] to the degree that they are — but not to the exclusion of quality commercial cinema."

Finally, the closer himself, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, weighed in, saying "I think both of these types of films deserve recognition... It's a good thing when people are in a theater and they stand up and cheer. It's a good thing when people are wiping tears because they're thinking back on their last 20 years of moviegoing and what it has meant to them. That, to me, is a very good thing — the sort of thing the Academy was founded, back in the day, to recognize."

WOW. If you didn't know that Kevin Feige is a Jedi Master of media training, there you go. He just made the most legitimate argument for Marvel to get Oscars we've heard yet. 

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now in theaters.