Sebastian Stan is a bit "protective" of Marvel's good intentions

The small curse of being an actor who has appeared in a few Marvel movies is that reporters are apparently legally bound to ask what you think about what other people think about Marvel movies every time you make something that’s not a Marvel movie. Ever since the concept of “superhero fatigue” took off after the pandemic, the actors have been left to defend their position or wryly acknowledge that yes, Marvel has some issues, but they do get paid fairly handsomely to do their job. 

Sebastian Stan fell more into the latter camp during a recent cover interview for Variety. “It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films]. And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion,” Stan told the trade outlet. “But they’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.” 

“Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good,” Stan continued. “It’s just fucking hard to make a good movie over and over again.”

There’s some truth to this; Marvel does generate a ton of capital for Disney and for its stars, and a “One for them, one for me” mentality has been the reality for Hollywood artists for decades. But whether that money actually goes to funding the smaller films in question is a bit more debatable. Elsewhere, for example, the profile points out how Stan’s Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice struggled to find a distributor, despite the praise it received at Cannes; Variety speculates that huge companies like Disney or Netflix wouldn’t want to risk upsetting Trump while there was still a chance he could become president. Of course, it’s not one-to-one—there’s presumably no amount of Marvel money that would convince Disney to wade into another culture war—but if that money goes to fund something like, say, Poor Things from another Disney subsidiary, that’s a good thing. 

Regardless, Stan goes on to admit that he’s “gotten much more aggressive about pursuing things that I want, and I’m constantly looking for different ways of challenging myself,” presumably with The Apprentice and with A Different Man. If Bucky Barnes empowered Stan to make the latter film, in this writer’s opinion, it was more than worth it.