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• Yellowstone inspired a cinematic universe, but Taylor Sheridan can't stand Marvel Studios' storytelling: "You know nothing."
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You could see how, in a large, cultural sense, there are some parallels to draw between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the interconnected Yellowstone saga, sometimes called the Duttonverse. They are, after all, both blockbuster hits with legions of fans, tell stories across centuries, and even have a "canon" that can't be underwritten by any of their pieces. And we didn't even get to the Harrison Ford of it all.

But whatever you think of the similarities between the two, maybe keep your opinon to yourself - at least when you're in he presence of Yellowstone's creator, Taylor Sheridan.

TV icon Sheridan recently sat down for a chat with Entertainment Weekly posted June 29. In this discussion, Sheridan was, at the very least very blunt, and perhaps even downright adversarial to Marvel Studios, though the problem he had with the billion-dollar franchise wasn't the interconnectivity of it all. It was that Marvel was "breaking all the very basic, fundamental rules of storytelling. Because they couldn't figure out their story."

Ouch.

"With a movie," Sheridan continued, "You're supposed to show me what's happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the people in this world feel about what's happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn't done or had done. So, if you stick to that one basic rule from the beginning, never have a character tell me something that the camera could show me." 

"All these Marvel movies do it, ad nauseam," he declared, "Where they will just have information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action."

Now to soften this blow a little bit, we will point out that Sheridan doesn't necessarily lay the blame on the writers room of Marvel Studios, per se. Rather, he thinks it's the folks up at the top that have the problem, and that shouldn't be there in the first place.

"The studio executives and the network executives — these are marketing executives, for the most part. Or maybe they studied law or whatever. Then they came, got a job in the mailroom at CAA or WME, and hated that s---. So then they ended up as an intern at some network. Then, through attrition, they find themselves the head of development. Well, what do you know about developing story? You know nothing. So they get terrified, panicked that the audience won’t get it because they actually have no storytellers."

OK, so maybe that didn't soften the blow that much...

Yellowstone and the rest of the Duttonverse is streaming now on Paramount+.

Consider this a meta post-credits scene for Marvel fans - the four key articles you need to read next to continue the thrills:

• How to watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe in release or chronological order
• The best Marvel Comics stories of all time
• All the MCU movies ranked from best to worst
• Our weekly Marvel insider's column, Marvel Matters