Steven Soderbergh Won’t Direct a Superhero Movie Because “Nobody’s F*cking!”

Legendary Ocean’s Eleven director Steven Soderbergh has weighed in the Marvel/superhero discourse with a take that’s a little different than those we’ve heard before. His claim? Superhero films — or rather, “blockbuster” movies with themes of a “fantasy-spectacle universe” are far too sexless to be entertaining.

His statements came in an interview with The Daily Beast spent promoting his upcoming HBO Max release Kimi. While he discussed HBO Max’s film release strategy, he spoke to the state of theatrical viewing amidst the COVID pandemic. Although he somewhat praised Spider-Man: No Way Home for pulling people out to theaters, there was much more to the discussion later on.

“Certainly, Spider-Man proves that if people want to go out to see something, they’ll go out to see it,” Soderbergh said. “I mean, that was in the middle of Omicron.”

Later on in the interview, though, Soderbergh lays on his critique of superhero films. Now, he’s not trying to sound prickly — but he has his reservations on making them and watching them. When asked if he’s been approached to make franchise blockbusters, the director offered a resounding “No.”

“Not really, and I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way,” said the director. “It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller. I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist [laughs]. I just have a lack of imagination in that regard, which is why the one foray I had into pure science-fiction [2002’s Solaris] was essentially a character drama that happened to be set on a spaceship.”

While he didn’t specifically target superhero movies, Soderbergh took aim at “blockbuster films,” seemingly targeting the sexlessness of films from both the Marvel and DC franchises.

“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 fucking,” Soderbergh said. “Nobody’s fucking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.”

When the interviewer agreed with Soderbergh, he continued: “The fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of fucking, and also things like—who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”

Luckily, the director will sex things up with his upcoming HBO Max release Magic Mike’s Last Dance. The third installation in the series has Channing Tatum returning to play his iconic male stripper role. Soderbergh teased the upcoming flick to round out his interview.

“Through a set of very odd circumstances, Mike is presented with the opportunity to make something like [the live show] happen, and the film is about another crazy collection of characters who are trying to pull this off,” he said. “It’s another of my disguised procedurals, but it’s got massive amounts of dancing in it, and I’m super excited about it. It’s as close to a full-blown musical as I’m ever going to get.”