Quentin Tarantino: Today’s Filmmakers ‘Can’t Wait’ for Superhero Movies to Fail

According to The Times, Tarantino recalled the moment where the mega-musical crashed and burned (specifically in 1969, the year of OUATIH) and that a younger generation of film school auteurs rejoiced. Today’s filmmakers “can’t wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies,” Tarantino said. “The analogy works because it’s a similar chokehold.” The director went on to add, “The writing’s not quite on the wall yet the way it was in 1969 when it was, ‘Oh my God, we just put a bunch of money into things that nobody gives a damn about anymore.’”

The analogy of comparing superhero movies of the 2010s and 2020s to musicals of the 1960s is not an unsound one. While many, including fellow auteur Steven Spielberg, have noted the similarity between Westerns and superhero movies with their mythologized images of a hero in a white hat/cape often making right with might, the musical might be a better comparison. That genre, literally the very first with the advent of sound in cinema, was at its most popular in the post-World War II boom years of the 1950s, and back when the Arthur Freed unit at MGM dominated the genre. You could call it the Marvel Studios of its day.

But whereas the Western just faded due to mind-numbing oversaturation on film and television, the musical was more acutely a Hollywood product given the production value and budget needed to make a traditional popular musical—which is to say it would’ve been harder for Sergio Leone and other Italian directors to put their own internationally renowned spin on the genre with a few desperados, cameras, and a Spanish desert (Jacques Demy’s more intimate French musicals are a different beast).

So in the 1960s, studios attempted to maintain audience interest by investing increasingly in mega-musicals with three-hour running times, intermissions, and either enormous sets or on location photography. While that worked beautifully for My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), the latter of which became the highest grossing movie ever at the time of its release, by the end of the decade youth generations raised on what their parents enjoyed (musicals and Westerns) began rejecting those genres en masse. And the amount of money studios spent on movies like Camelot (1967), Doctor Doolittle (1967), Hello, Dolly! (1969), and Paint Your Wagon (1969) proved to be a disaster for Hollywood. Doctor Dolittle alone nearly sank 20th Century Fox about 60 years before Disney finished the job, and Paint Your Wagon could be viewed as the death knell for both musicals and Westerns in Hollywood… and certainly of Clint Eastwood’s singing career!

All of which is to say the most popular genre of the beginning of the decade proved to be the most nightmarish for studio accountants by the end of it, and helped hasten the end of the final days of the classic studio system. In the wreckage, a new generation of filmmakers, the “New Hollywood” of Scorsese and Coppola, Spielberg and De Palma, and Lucas and Friedkin, found it a lot easier to make the type of movies they wanted to make, and which Hollywood would’ve never greenlit 10 years earlier.

According to Tarantino, a whole new generation of filmmakers—and perhaps several of them—are hoping that superhero movies go the same way, and with their implosion will come a new opportunity for original ideas and voices to dominate what’s left of the studio system.