Matthew Vaughn Says Superhero Films Should Be Better

Matthew Vaughn, the director of X-Men: First Class (2011), the Kingsman franchise, and the upcoming Argylle, shared a few opinions on superhero films at New York Comic Con last week. “I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero in the sense that, I do think, maybe we all need a little bit of time off from it,” reports Screenrant. He also said that hopefully Marvel “will go back to less is more and make less films and concentrate on making them great.”

It’s true that since Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the X-Men franchise, and Blade in the early 2000s, superhero films have only gotten more and more prevalent, with two or three blockbusters from Marvel and DC premiering every year. Now, Vaughn says, “Superhero films are films. It’s a film that has superheroes in it. I think what happened was that they became superheroes, and the film part wasn’t that important.”

He had this advice to offer: “When you’re making a superhero movie, you sort of have to work harder because you’ve got to make people believe it. That’s why X-Men: First Class was pretty grounded. We set it in the Cuban Missile Crisis; they had relatable human problems.”

Okay… well… the Cuban Missile Crises is probably not the most relatable of problems that people could be dealing with, but we get what he means: grounded, real-world problems, like international incidents that almost incite nuclear war. That’s the kind of focused storytelling that’s really missing from Marvel these days. It’s a hilariously odd take, but the rest of Vaughn’s response is fairly understandable. Make less superhero films better, with more practical effects and with characters people care about. Seems easy enough to me.

Argylle will have a full theatrical release on Feb. 2, 2024. The Apple TV+ streaming release date is unannounced.

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