Marvel Movies Are Geared Toward Kids, Seth Rogen Says

While Seth Rogen is primarily known for being a stoner with a memorable laugh in Judd Apatow movies, these days he’s doing at least as much producing as he is acting, with five of his current and upcoming production projects being rooted in comic book origins. And so Rogen has opinions about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which he spoke about in a new interview with Total Film Magazine.

“I think that Kevin Feige is a brilliant guy, and I think a lot of the filmmakers he’s hired to make these movies are great filmmakers,” Rogen said. “But as someone who doesn’t have children… it is [all] kind of geared toward kids, you know? There are times where I will forget. I’ll watch one of these things, as an adult with no kids, and be like, ‘Oh, this is just not for me.'”

Rogen’s assertion about the intended demographic for Marvel movies is perhaps painting with too broad a brush. Marvel movies are aimed at the largest possible audience, and kids just happen to be a part of that; parents without kids are a sizable portion as well. Regardless, Rogen also realizes that the Marvel movies are helping his other projects succeed. Rogen is a producer on Amazon Prime Video’s live-action series The Boys and the Invincible animated series, both of which poke at and jump off of superhero tropes in their own ways.

“Truthfully, without Marvel, The Boys wouldn’t exist or be interesting. I’m aware of that,” Rogen continued. “I think if it was only Marvel [in the marketplace], it would be bad. But I think it isn’t–clearly. An example I’m always quoting is, there’s a point in history where a bunch of filmmakers would’ve been sitting around being like, ‘Do you think we’ll ever make a movie that’s not a Western again? Everything’s a Western! Westerns dominate the f***ing movies. If it doesn’t have a hat and a gun and a carriage, people aren’t going to see it anymore.”

Rogen is referring to the era from the 1930s until the 1960s, in which Westerns were an increasingly popular genre for theaters, with its most lucrative period in the 1940s and 1950s. We still get occasional Westerns these days, but it’s a trickle now compared to the flood during that period, so the comparison makes sense.

“The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields,” Rogen said. “There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.”

The Boys Season 4 is on the way, as is Invincible Season 2, which was revealed in a cheeky trailer featuring Rogen as his character, Allen the Alien. Rogen is also producing a college-set live-action spin-off of The Boys, titled Gen V, for Prime Video.