NYT Interview part 4-Superhero movies and the changing Hollywood

Q. In 2013, you and your friend George Lucas were at the University of California and you said some big things about the movie industry.

I still stand by [that]. What I said was that it’s only going to take three or four super-blockbusters to damage the bottom line because these movies are all now costing between $225 and $300 million. If the general public finds another genre — maybe some young filmmaker will invent a genre — which starts to supplant the superhero movie this thing could happen. It almost happened a couple of summers ago, not to the extent that it hurt Hollywood. But I don’t believe that the superhero genre has the legs of the western genre, I don’t even think it has the legs of the sci-fi genre. I think that there’s a firewall between sci-fi and superhero — I don’t like to mix them because I think it’s sacrilegious. [Laughs.] At the same time, if I had a chance to make a superhero movie, I’d do it because it’s good business to do it right now. If I could find a huge superhero franchise — I’ve got one called “Transformers” — why not?