Filmmaker Martin Scorsese's disdain for superhero movies is no secret, and his dismissal of Marvel blockbusters has upset a lot of people in recent years.
While he's entitled to his opinion - particularly after what's proven to be an extraordinary career - the way he's casually waved off the contributions of those who work on comic book adaptations has proven to be most problematic for many movie fans. After all, are the likes of Black Panther and Avengers: Endgame not also cinema?
The co-director of the latter, Joe Russo, certainly thinks so and neither he nor Anthony has ever shied away from disagreeing with Scorsese's scathing assessment. Recently, Joe shared a TikTok of him introducing his dog as "Box Office" in response to a video of the Killers of the Flower Moon helmer revealing his pooch, "Oscar."
It was meant in good fun, but the backlash was immediate and vocal. Some Scorsese-loving critics were so incensed, that they resorted to personal insults and claims no one will ever remember the directors behind the second-highest-grossing movie ever made.
Now, Joe has responded to that during an interview with Kevin Smith.
"[Martin Scorsese is] one of the reasons, one of the biggest reasons that we're sitting up here. It's the influence of his movies," he says. "You know, it's interesting because my daughter runs my social media account the way his daughter runs his social media account, and we saw this cute video he did with his dog, and we happen to have an identical dog, they're both Schnauzers, and I thought, 'This is hilarious, this could be really cute.'|
"His video is talking to his dog, he's coaching it through, you know, like he's training his dog like it's going to do a part for him. His dog's name is Oscar."
"My daughter was like, 'That's funny, what if our dog's name was Box Office?' And I went, 'Oh, that's funny. That's cute.' And then we posted it on TikTok. We do a bunch of TikTok videos together, it's like how I stay connected to my daughter," Russo adds. "She has all these funny ideas and we're trying all this shit all the time. And we posted it and then people discovered it like a week after we posted it."
"I think people conflated the timing of when they discovered it with his movie, which was not the intention. This was just like a broad appeal joke." Russo went on to call the situation a "sh*t storm" and joked that he'd been "internet-ed."
Based on the response, those Scorsese fans just aren't as thick-skinned as comic book readers! Anyway, you can check out the full interview with the Russo Brothers in the player below.