Kevin Feige Responds To Scorsese: "We Killed Half Our Characters At The End Of A Movie"

Kevin Feige has broken his silence on Martin Scorsese's superhero movie comments. A week after The Irishman director published a New York Times essay that in a better world would have put a stop to the discourse, Feige is responding to Scorsese's arguments that Marvel movies aren't "cinema."

Feige is a consummate strategist, which means he would naturally wait until the discourse over Marvel movies and "cinema" will have all but died down before putting in his two cents. In an interview with Scott Feinberg on The Hollywood Reporter's podcast Awards Chatter, Feige finally weighed in on Scorsese's criticism of superhero movies as being risk-averse pieces of entertainment that don't fit his definition of "cinema." Feige took issue with Scorsese's comments on Marvel movies' lack of risk, pointing to the high body count in Avengers: Infinity War:

"We did Civil War. We had our two most popular characters get into a very serious theological and physical altercation. We killed half of our characters at the end of a movie. I think it's fun for us to take our success and use it to take risks and go in different places."

But is a high body count something that Feige can really fall back on if death means nothing in the MCU? And it feels like Feige is missing the point of what Scorsese defined as risk: Scorsese wasn't speaking so much to narrative risks as he was creative risks. Feige can't really call the death of half the characters at the end of Avengers: Infinity War a risk if the audience knew that a Black Panther sequel had already been greenlit.

But Feige acknowledges that he and Scorsese may have different definitions of what "risk" entails in Hollywood, and ends his response by diplomatically stating that "Everybody is entitled to their opinion":

"Everybody has a different definition of cinema. Everybody has a different definition of art. Everybody has a different definition of risk. Some people don't think it's cinema. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. Everyone is entitled to repeat that opinion. Everyone is entitled to write op-eds about that opinion, and I look forward to what will happen next. But in the meantime, we're going to keep making movies."

Now, can we put this discussion to bed?