Anthony Mackie was very much a film guy in his early career, first in small roles in the likes of “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Half Nelson” and “Million Dollar Baby” before breaking through with “The Hurt Locker” and “We Are Marshall” into key supporting and some lead roles including being a big cog in the machine that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Yet Mackie is also someone who has readily embraced streaming – starring in no less than three direct-to-streaming films to date for the likes of Netflix and Apple, as well as TV series such as Netflix’s “Altered Carbon” and the Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”.
Speaking to The Daily Beast this week ahead of the launch of the second season of “Altered Carbon” on Friday, Mackie says he is quite optimistic about the future of film, but the theatrical experience is pretty much done beyond event films as all the interesting filmmakers have flocked to streaming.
“To be frank about it, filmmakers don’t work in film anymore. If we look at the movies we grew up loving, that we think are the best movies of all time, those movies won’t be made now by studios; they’ll be made by streaming services.
So if your movie isn’t an event – if you’re not in ‘Avengers’ or ‘Suicide Squad’ or ‘Star Wars’ – it’s very hard to get people to go to the movie theater, for many different reasons. Fear factor, cost. I have kids, and for me to take my kids to the movies, it’s $115. So we watch movies at home.
As soon as Fortune 500 companies bought all the film studios, the idea of making films was dead. So that being said, the only place you can go and work with the filmmakers you adore is streaming services.”
Mackie goes on to say streaming is the future in part because younger generations don’t want to follow the old and shut out the world for a few hours:
“Great movies are being made, they’re just not being made for the theaters because young people don’t want to sit in a room and chill out. They want to move, and watch it on their cell phones and tablets. They can’t sit still; it’s a different world now.
We had time, because we didn’t have cell phones. We could sit in a movie theater and make out with a girl and eat popcorn. But dudes don’t do that anymore. You can do that virtually now; you don’t have to hide in a movie theater.”
Mackie has multiple films on the way including 20th Century Studios’ “The Woman in the Window” which is going theatrical, Netflix’s “Outside the Wire,” “The Banker” for Apple TV+ and will soon play famed lawyer Johnnie Cochran in “Signal Hill”.
