Martin Scorsese‘s daughter Francesca has become a viral TikTok star over the last few months thanks to her humorous videos featuring her Oscar-winning father. One such video, titled “The Muse,” garnered a lot of attention in October after it earned a response from “Avengers” co-director Joe Russo. In Francesca’s TikTok, Martin Scorsese playfully gives directing notes to her dog, Oscar. Russo responded with his own video in which he jokingly calls his dog “Box Office.”
While Russo was being playful, his video rubbed many people the wrong way as it came off as Russo gloating about his Marvel grosses at a time when Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” wasn’t exactly setting the box office on fire. Scorsese infamously spoke out against Marvel movies several years ago, criticizing them for putting a stronghold on film exhibition and forcing mid-budget movies and more adult-oriented fare out of the mainstream marketplace.
In a new interview with GQ, Francesca said she had not yet seen Russo’s divisive response to her beloved “The Muse.” Francesca herself is familiar with trolling her dad over his infamous Marvel comments. One of her first viral social media moments was when she wrapped Christmas gifts for her father in Marvel wrapping paper. It earned a huge response online, which Francesca never saw coming.
“I don’t want to offend anybody or anything,” Francesca told GQ about the Marvel debate. “I do very much stand with my dad, but I did educate myself. Originally, when I was agreeing with him, I’d never seen a single Marvel film. And then during COVID, I finished all of them, but I still stand by it. I will say some of them are fun.”
“People keep telling me to get him a Marvel cake,” she added. “I’m like, ‘He might kill me.’”
Scorsese first shared his Marvel criticisms in an October 2019 interview with Empire magazine while promoting “The Irishman.”
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” Scorsese said at the time. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
Scorsese later published an op-ed essay in The New York Times in which he wrote that cinema is about “revelation, aesthetic, characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
That is all absent in Marvel movies, he wrote, adding that while “many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures,” ultimately “what’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon” is playing in theaters nationwide from Apple and Paramount.
