Celebrated filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has been announced as producer on the 2021 Academy Awards ceremony along with Stacey Sher (“Contagion,” “Out of Sight”) and Jesse Collins. The ceremony takes place April 25th 2021 at which point cinemas will have been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year.
The news comes as Soderbergh’s name has been popping up in a number of places in the past week to promote his HBO Max film “Let Them All Talk” releasing on that service tomorrow. Talking to The Daily Beast, he confirmed he’s working on creating a box set of several of his own films with new restorations and brand-new edits including the long-awaited “Kafka” re-release.
Soderbergh says he’s aiming to release the box-set next year and it will boast the “seven titles that have reverted back to me, or that I have some control over.” He confirmed he’s been remastering them and tinkering with them – making both “Schizopolis” and “Full Frontal” a big shorter and “Kafka” is a much more significant overhaul.
Soderbergh also offered some thoughts on the Warner Bros.-HBO Max decision and asked does this mean cinemas will end as we know them? Not likely:
“Not at all. [The streaming push is] just a reaction to an economic reality that I think everybody is going to have to acknowledge pretty soon, which is that even with a vaccine, the theatrical movie business won’t be robust enough in 2021 to justify the amount of P&A you need to spend to put a movie into wide release.
There’s no scenario in which a theater that is 50% full, or at least can’t be made 100% full, is a viable paradigm to put out a movie in. But that will change. We will reach a point where anybody who wants to go to a movie will feel safe going to a movie.
Let’s be clear: there is no bonanza in the entertainment industry that is the equivalent of a movie that grosses a billion dollars or more theatrically. That is the holy grail. So the theatrical business is not going away. There are too many companies that have invested too much money in the prospect of putting out a movie that blows up in theaters – there’s nothing like it. It’s all going to come back. But I think Warners is saying: not as soon as you think.”
He goes on to say he thinks the decision will finally push the studios and NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) to begin some practical conversations about windowing and fluidity in film release plans.
Source: The Los Angeles Times
