‘Eternals’ highlights the limits elite directors face with Marvel, ‘Star Wars’ and DC movies

Arguably, Lucasfilm made a misstep when the studio enlisted three different directors, initially, to oversee each installment of the most recent “Star Wars” trilogy, running into a buzzsaw in trying to accommodate those separate visions.

Again, these movies diverge from what Scorsese considers true “cinema” in one key respect: Marvel and “Star Wars” represent vast franchises, which inspire TV shows and theme-park rides and sell merchandise to feed back into the coffers of corporate parent Disney. Those dynamics turn each movie into a piece in a larger puzzle, one that establishes guardrails on a director’s input.

Following those marching orders might not be for every filmmaker, but at this point nobody can plead ignorance about how the system functions, which requires taking directions as well as giving them.

When it works, the relationship has its mutual benefits. Marvel made Zhao’s Oscar win a part of “Eternals'” promotion campaign, clearly taking pride in the connection. Directors associated with smaller films receive the opportunity to exercise different muscles on something that will be more widely seen and lucrative than a carefully polished independent gem.

Still, there’s an old saying that goes, “If you take the king’s coin you give the king his due.” In modern movie parlance, the related maxim would be when you take the Mouse’s money, the big cheeses there, ultimately, are the ones who call the shots.