Enough has been written about Martin Scorsese‘s criticisms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that there’s no point going over them again, but the short version is that the legendary filmmaker doesn’t care for the comic book juggernaut churning out identikit blockbusters that sacrifice the magic of cinema in favor of being more like a “theme park” than a movie.
With that in mind, there’s more than a little hint of irony to Scorsese being granted an audience with the Pope over the weekend, only to announced immediately afterwards that he’s planning to make his second feature on the life and times of Jesus Christ, following on from the controversial 1988 classic The Last Temptation of Christ, which was nominated for one Academy Award and two Razzies.
“I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus. And I’m about to start making it.”
Is it a sequel? A prequel? A reboot? A legacy continuation? A remake? A requel? A sidequel? Nobody knows at this stage, but we can answer pretty definitively that the answer is going to be none of the above. After all, this is Scorsese we’re talking about at the end of the day, and you can only imagine how those signature bushy brows of his would bristle were he accused of repeating himself.
If we can get three versions of Spider-Man in a decade and four big screen iterations of Batman in the same amount of time, then Scorsese is well within his rights to bring Jesus to the multiplex twice in the span of 35 years. Just don’t call it a reimagining…