It’s kind of strange, considering the genre’s popularity; interview anyone in the entertainment industry, and you’ll find that just about everyone not actively working on a superhero film considers them to be a pox on the cinema. Ridley Scott’s the latest talent to confess to super-fatigue, in a new interview with Digital Spy where he expresses a larger concern for the overall state of film art. 2016 was a humbling year for the Hollywood studio system, and one of its biggest names can’t help but take notice.

In the interview, Scott stated that he had been approached to direct an unnamed superhero film on numerous occasions, but turned the opportunity down on principle. “Superhero movies are not my kind of thing – that’s why I’ve never really done one,” Scott said. “[I’ve been asked] several times, but I can’t believe in the thin, gossamer tightrope of the non-reality of the situation of the superhero.” Feels a little strange for a man who made his name directing sci-fi films to start issuing proclamations about non-reality, but okay, we‘re listening.

Scott’s language got a little saltier as his comments got more direct: “I’ve done that kind of movie — Blade Runner really is a comic strip when you think about it, it’s a dark story told in an unreal world. You could almost put Batman or Superman in that world, that atmosphere, except I’d have a f---ing good story, as opposed to no story!”

The Digital Spy item goes on to quote the Alien: Covenant director as describing the cinema as ‘pretty bad,’ a rather disheartening statement following a year that yielded so many phenomenal indie films. It’s started to become conventional wisdom that 2016 was a bad year for studio releases, and if it felt like cinema was dying overall, it meant you weren’t looking in the right places. While Scott’s frustration with a rigid studio system in understandable, his outright cynicism is a touch misplaced.

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