8 Directors Who Hate Superhero Movies

Nominated for 9 Oscars, of which it won 4, Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman tells the story of a former actor in superhero movies (Michael Keaton) struggling to establish himself on Broadway, so you’d expect the director to have an opinion on the superhero genre.

Nobody expected him to brand them as “cultural genocide”, though.

“The audience is so overexposed to plot and situations and poop that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human,” the filmmaker stated in 2014. “Superheroes – just the word hero bothers me. What the £$%& does that mean? It’s a false, misleading conception, the superhero. Then, the way they apply violence to it, it’s absolutely right wing.”

Inarritu won Best Director for Birdman, a trick he repeated the following year with The Revenant, so his words must’ve struck a chord in liberal Hollywood.