A recent video from director Joe Russo has drawn the ire of the film industry after the filmmaker took some playful jabs at legendary director Martin Scorsese.
This past week, a TikTok video from Scorsese’s daughter Francesca showed the iconic director talking to his Schnauzer dog, Oscar, and playfully talking about casting him in a film. In response, Russo created an Instagram video with his own dog, also a Schnauzer, and jokingly calls him “box office.”
“Aw look, he’s got a schnauzer! I love schnauzers. And his name is Oscar. That’s really cute,” Russo says in his video replying to Scorsese’s TikTok. Talking to his own dog, he adds: “Ok come on, Box Office.”
Film industry criticizes Russo for his video
The video was clearly meant to be a playful joke referencing the fan-created battle between Scorsese’s comments about Marvel films not being “cinema.” However, despite the playfulness of the video, the film industry at large was not happy with it.
People were quick to take to social media to criticize Russo for the video. Toonami co-founder and Warner Bros. Discovery’s SVP of action and anime series Jason DeMarco went at Russo for his 2022 film The Grey Man, implying that no one would remember the film in 20 years.
“Joe Russo took hundreds of millions from Netflix to make whatever he wanted, and came up with…’The Grey Man,’” wrote DeMarco in his since-deleted tweet. “Marty got hundreds of millions from Netflix and Apple, and made ‘The Irishman’ and ‘Killers of The Flower Moon.’ I know which movies ppl will talk about in 20 years…”
Writer Louis Peitzman also chimed in, noting that “in 50 years no one will know who Joe Russo is,” while others in the film community also chimed in.