Chadwick Boseman has weighed in on the controversy regarding Martin Scorsese’s comments about Marvel movies and the art of cinema.

While promoting 21 Bridges, Boseman told BBC 5 Live that while he respects Scorsese’s opinion because “he’s a genius at what he does,” he said he wonders about the timing of Scorsese’s statement about Marvel films being more akin to theme parks, not cinema.

“You’ve got to think about when he’s saying it. He’s saying it when he’s possibly campaigning for an award,” he said, according to IndieWire. “He’s saying it at a time when he’s making a Netflix movie [The Irishman], so that’s how eyes get on his film, and it’s not going to be in the cinemas–it’s not going to be seen the best way.”

He also addressed Scorsese’s comments about the humanity found in cinema that he feels is lacking in Marvel films, which he further addressed in his New York Times opinion piece attempting to explain his prior comments. Cinema, Scorsese wrote, “was about revelation–aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters–the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.”

“The mystery that Scorsese is talking about is in Black Panther. If he saw it, he didn’t get that there was this feeling of not knowing what was going to happen that Black people felt,” Boseman rebutted in his BBC comments. “We thought, you know, ‘White people will kill us off, so it’s a possibility that we could be gone.’ We felt that angst. We felt that thing you would feel from cinema when we watched it. That’s cultural. Maybe it’s generational.”

21 Bridges will open in theaters on November 22.

READ MORE:

’21 Bridges’: Final Trailer For Chadwick Boseman, Stephan James Thriller

Here’s What Samuel L. Jackson Says About Martin Scorsese’s Comment About Marvel Films Not Being Cinema

Photo: Marvel Studios

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