If we’re completely honest, Anthony Mackie hasn’t had the best career. For every good film he’s been in, like 8 Mile or The Hurt Locker, there’s also Desert Warrior and Crossover (a film with a 2% Rotten Tomatoes score). And yet, the MCU star has very strong feels about Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. According to an old clip that’s going viral again, Mackie has no love for the DCEU film, even calling out a journalist who defended the film: “You’re bananas… you’re bananas.”
An old clip from a Collider interview during a 2015 Our Brand Is Crisis press junket has suddenly picked up on social media in the last while. Steven Weintraub was running Mackie through a rapid-fire “Save or Kill” game when things quickly turned ugly. Since he plays Falcon (now Captain America) in the MCU, Weintraub’s question about DC-or-Marvel was meant to be a throwaway, expecting the star to say Marvel, obviously, and laughing it off. That didn’t happen. Instead, Mackie turned it into an ambush, demanding to know the last good DC movie Weintraub had seen and calling Weintraub out on his love for Man of Steel. “You have awful taste!” Mackie insisted.
In the clip, we see Weintraub say that he genuinely loves Man of Steel, citing Hans Zimmer’s score, the Krypton opening, and the ensemble cast, and says he’s had to defend the film again and again since 2013. But Mackie got personal and even said, “That scares me that you are reviewing movies.”
When Weintraub mentions that he loves the Marvel Universe too, especially Civil War, Mackie takes another dig at him: “No, no, no… Don’t say it’s good. If you say it’s good, that means it’s awful. You have awful taste.”
Since that interview in 2015, Mackie has had a few box office bombs, including one in the MCU. Call me crazy, but I’d rather watch Man of Steel any day of the week over Captain America: Brave New World, which many, including myself, believe was a complete mess. The film earned roughly $415.1 million at the box office, which isn’t bad, but is nowhere near how much the other MCU pulled in. Deadline also reported that the film needed around $425 million worldwide to break even. It didn’t. So it was ultimately a huge loss for Marvel.
But what the interview highlights is just how divided fans are when it comes to the Marvel and DC argument. Heck, even within the DC Universe, fans are split over the DCU and DCEU films. It’s clear that one man’s gold is another man’s trash.
Mackie clearly has a preference: Marvel’s lighter and brighter films over the DCEU’s darker and grittier ones. The Falcon/Captain America actor will reprise his popular role in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday film later this year. Based on the hype around it, it’s clear that it will another huge win for Marvel. But that doesn’t make Man of Steel any less worth defending. Mackie can have his MCU wins and his box office bombs, and Snyder’s Superman can still be the better film for plenty of people — the two things aren’t in competition, no matter how badly Mackie wants them to be. Ten years on, a journalist getting called “bananas” for loving a movie is still the most relatable thing about this whole exchange.
Tell us, do you agree? Can you love both Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and the MCU — Mackie’s opinion be damned?
