Oliver Stone Slams Marvel, 'John Wick' and 'Fast & Furious' Movies: 'People in Showbiz Are Idiots'

The Oscar-winning director said movies today have "lost touch with reality"

Oliver Stone is weighing in on the state of cinema today — and he isn’t mincing his words.

The 76-year-old Platoon writer-director recently told Variety he had seen the Keanu Reeves movie John Wick 4 on a plane. “Talk about volume,” he said. “I think the film is disgusting beyond belief. Disgusting."

“I don’t know what people are thinking,” Stone continued, referencing Hollywood producers and filmmakers.

“Maybe I was watching G.I. Joe when I was a kid. But [Reeves] kills, what, three, four hundred people in the f---ing movie. And as a combat veteran, I gotta tell you, not one of them is believable. I realize it’s a movie, but it’s become a video game more than a movie," he said.

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He added that movies today have “lost touch with reality. The audience perhaps likes the video game. But I get bored by it."

“How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What’s the difference between Fast and Furious and some other film?" said Stone. "It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s a super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable.”

According to Variety, while receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Transilvania Film Festival in Romania earlier this month, the Oscar winner said, “People in showbiz are idiots. They just go with the trend, they just go with the fashion — it’s a fashion business.”

Related: Oliver Stone Says Harvey Weinstein 'Shouldn't Be Condemned' But Later Clarifies: 'I'm Appalled'

This isn’t the first time Stone has made his views clear on how the moviemaking industry has evolved since the late '70s, when he got his start with Midnight Express and Scarface.

“If I made any of my films [today], I don’t think I’d last,” Stone told SiriusXM’s Jim Norton & Sam Roberts in 2020. “I’d be vilified. I’d be attacked. Shamed."

“I would have had to step on so many sensitivities. You have to have some freedom to make a movie, unfortunately," he said. "You have to be rude. You can be bad. And you’re going to have to do these things like step on toes. Holy cow. Do you think I could have made any one of those films?”

Stone’s new comments echo those of fellow directors who have spoken out against the ubiquity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other popular franchises.

Martin Scorsese has aired his frustrations with comic book movies repeatedly, telling Empire in 2019 that he has tried and failed to watch Marvel movies.

“That’s not cinema,” the Goodfellas director said at the time. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

In 2021, The Power of the Dog director Jane Campion joined in the debate, telling Variety, “I actually hate [superhero movies] ... They're so noisy and ridiculous. Sometimes you get a good giggle, but I don't know what the thing is with the capes, a grown man in tights. I feel like it must come from pantomime.”

Related: Martin Scorsese Says Marvel Films Are 'Not Cinema' as Joss Whedon and James Gunn Respond

Stone also recently told Variety that when Hollywood gatekeepers produce films now, “they want to think about how do we market it, who’s going to watch it? Of course, that’s a consideration. But it becomes the sole consideration.”

Of his own trajectory throughout the industry, he added, “As I got older, I became more angry, not less.”

Stone has been nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won three: for penning Midnight Express, directing Platoon and directing Born on the Fourth of July. His newest film, the documentary Nuclear Now, premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival.

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