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Seven years after sparking a debate over Marvel movies and the role of franchise blockbusters in the movie industry, Martin Scorsese is joining another Disney franchise: Star Wars. The Oscar-winning director and defender of the cinematic experience can be heard in the new trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, as the voice of an Ardennian shopkeeper.
Scorsese’s unnamed character seems all too happy to lend Din Djarin a hand until the bounty hunter mentions Hutts. At that point, the Adrennian quickly closes up shop.
This isn’t Scorsese’s first voice-acting gig, having voiced Sykes in 2004’s Shark Tale. It also isn’t the first time that a director of serious cinema has participated in one of The Mandalorian‘s adventures, with Werner Herzog previously appearing in the show’s debut season as “The Client,” the person who hired Din Djarin to find and retrieve Grogu, offering a memorable and memeable delivery of the line, “I would like to see the baby.”
Scorsese joining Star Wars will likely feel different, though, given how he’s been painted as a kind of cinematic killjoy boogeyman by certain particularly passionate corners of the internet after saying that Marvel movies are “not cinema.” Whether that’s ever been an accurate depiction of the director is another story.
It isn’t like Scorsese made his career directing obscure arthouse films. Goodfellas is an oft-quoted classic with mass appeal. It was so popular among young men of a certain generation that it was sometimes (mostly) jokingly considered a “red flag” movie.
Martin Scorsese Joins The Mandalorian and Grogu
Scorsese’s comments were more about intent, and they apply across multiple media. There’s a difference between franchise films and “cinema,” as he would call it, in the same way that there’s a difference between a beach read and a literary classic. They serve different purposes, and pretending they don’t only flattens the entire conversation.
Scorsese’s complaints were really an expression of frustration with the state of Hollywood right now. People aren’t going to the movies the way they used to. The wider quarterly-earnings-obsessed economy rewards expensive products with high profit margins, and that applies to Hollywood as much as anywhere else. Thus, Hollywood relies on expensive movies primed for blockbuster box-office payoffs, leaving less room for the (relatively) more modestly budgeted movies that Scorsese likes to make.
But that doesn’t mean the man can’t enjoy a roller coaster ride from time to time. In fact, as in most things, variety is the best approach. It’s also not like some movies can’t be a little bit of both. It’s a spectrum, not a binary.
After all, when George Lucas created Star Wars, as much as he was trying to make a new Flash Gordon movie, he was equally trying to imitate the filmmaking of Akira Kurosawa, whose Japanese-language movies were the movies more likely to be shown at art-house cinemas in America. These things don’t exist in vacuums; they cross-pollinate.
The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters on May 22.
