Master filmmaker Steven Spielberg offered a new interview to The New York Times recently and gave a rather interesting take on the business of movie making during and after the pandemic and amidst the rise of the streaming services.
The “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” helmer set his sights on HBO Max in particular, namely for last year’s day-and-date release strategy of the entire slate of Warner Bros. Pictures films.
He says the approach of putting high profile new releases on streaming has changed moviegoing habits for adults and basically screwed over major filmmakers:
“The pandemic created an opportunity for streaming platforms to raise their subscriptions to record-breaking levels and also throw some of my best filmmaker friends under the bus as their movies were unceremoniously not given theatrical releases.
They were paid off and the films were suddenly relegated to, in this case, HBO Max. The case I’m talking about. And then everything started to change. I think older audiences were relieved that they didn’t have to step on sticky popcorn.
But I really believe those same older audiences, once they got into the theater, the magic of being in a social situation with a bunch of strangers is a tonic…it’s up to the movies to be good enough to get all the audiences to say that to each other when the lights come back up.”
It was the success Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” which scored a $151 million domestic gross, that ended up giving him hope for the future of adult-targeted movies at the box-office, saying:
“I found it encouraging that ‘Elvis’ broke $100 million at the domestic box office. A lot of older people went to see that film, and that gave me hope that people were starting to come back to the movies as the pandemic becomes an endemic. I think movies are going to come back. I really do.”
So will Spielberg make any concessions towards streaming? He says he does openly consider a streaming-only release more than ever these days, especially for a certain kind of film:
“I made ‘The Post’ as a political statement about our times… I don’t know if I had been given that script post-pandemic whether I would have preferred to have made that film for Apple or Netflix and gone out to millions of people.
Because the film had something to say to millions of people, and we were never going to get those millions of people into enough theaters to make that kind of difference. Things have changed enough to get me to say that to you.”
The comments come as Spielberg’s latest directorial effort, the autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” opens exclusively in select movie theaters on November 11th before expanding nationwide on November 23rd.
