Hollywood auteurs have long been outspoken opponents of superhero cinema, with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola going the length to say the films aren’t worthy of being art. When it comes to Steven Soderbergh, however, he has a completely different bone to pick with the world of tights and capes. In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, the Oscar-winner said he doesn’t think superheroes are having enough sex.
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“I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way. It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller,” Soderbergh told the website. “I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist [laughs]. I just have a lack of imagination in that regard, which is why the one foray I had into pure science-fiction [2002’s ‘Solaris’] was essentially a character drama that happened to be set on a spaceship.”
That’s when the filmmaker added he didn’t feel superheroes weren’t intimate enough.
“Also, for a lot of these, for me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters — apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers — there’s no f-cking,” he continued. “Nobody’s f-cking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing…the fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of f-cking, and also things like — who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”
For what it’s worth, Marvel’s Eternals technically included the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first-ever sex scene, despite the filming sticking with Disney’s standard PG-13 rating.
“Chloé [Zhao} was very adamant about it because she wanted that relationship to feel real and not PG,” Eternals producer Nate Moore previously told ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast. “And even in the development phase of the movie, we thought the Eternals would be a bit more evolved about sexuality than you, or I, or ratings boards. You know what I mean? It felt disingenuous to be like, oh, and these people also just hold hands all the time. Like they’re 7,000 years old guys.”
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