Steven Soderbergh Doesn’t Want To Do A Superhero Movie Because In The Genre ‘Nobody’s F*cking’

A lot of acclaimed auteurs don’t like superhero movies. Ridley Scott thinks their scripts “are not any f*cking good.” Argentinian director Lucretia Martel, who was approached to direct one but declined because Marvel wouldn’t let her actually direct the action scenes, finds them “hard to watch.” And then there’s Martin Scorsese, the poet laureate of comic book movie haters, who slammed them for turning a once-diverse industry into, in his summation, a one trick pony.

Steven Soderbergh, who was once nominated for two separate Best Director Oscars in the same year (and won for Traffic, losing to himself for Erin Brockovich), has a more specific gripe. He doesn’t like them because they’re insufficiently (or, really, nonexistently) horny.

In a new interview with The Daily Beast, the director of the Ocean’s trilogy, who hasn’t worked for a major studio in ages and even briefly “retired” from movies in 2013, was asked if ever gets asked to return to franchises.

“Not really,” he replied, adding, “and I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way.” He said he simply prefers making movies with realistic “Newtonian physics” (like his remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi drama Solaris). But there was another issue he had with them:

“Also, for a lot of these, for me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters—apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers—there’s no f*cking. Nobody’s f*cking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.”

On top of why the genre “typically doesn’t involve a lot of f*cking,” Soderbergh had other questions, like, “who’s paying these people Who do they work for How does this job come to be” (Tony Stark really is the only one who seems to be independently wealthy.) He did add, “If people want to go experience that universe, that’s fine. As a filmmaker, I just don’t know where to start.”

Meanwhile, Soderbergh is hard at work on his own franchise, and it is full of sex, or at least randiness. He’s prepping for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the third in the beloved male stripper genre starring Channing Tatum and his latest for HBO Max, who also ponied up for No Sudden Move and the forthcoming KIMI. He teases that the threequel is “ as close to a full-blown musical as I’m ever going to get.” So Soderbergh does like franchises, long as they’re realistic or at least realistically titillating.