The theatrical experience is a special one, but it’s hard to deny the rise of streaming in recent years. When the pandemic shut down theaters, studios turned to streaming services to release their movies, but even when the world started to open back up, it was clear things weren’t going back to how they were before. It’s a new world out there, but filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg aren’t fond of streaming companies “unceremoniously” dumping movies on their services.
While speaking with The New York Times, Steven Spielberg took issue with Warner Bros.’ choice to release all of their 2021 movies on HBO Max and in theaters on the same day. “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,” Spielberg said. “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.” Steven Spielberg is clearly a big supporter of the theatrical experience, but audiences today have so many more options when it comes to viewing movies. Spielberg knows that “it’s up to the movies to be good enough” to justify the experience of watching a movie in a theater.
While the director said that movies from Marvel, DC, and other tentpoles will always take the lion’s share of the box office, he finds it encouraging when other movies are able to make an impact as well. “I found it encouraging that ‘Elvis’ broke $100 million at the domestic box office,” Spielberg said. “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.”
Although Steven Spielberg has previously had harsh words for streaming services, he acknowledges that certain movies might benefit from that release model, even some of his own. “I made ‘The Post’ as a political statement about our times by reflecting the Nixon administration, and we thought that was an important reflection for a lot of people to understand what was happening to our country,” Spielberg said. “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.“
Steven Spielberg’s next movie, The Fabelmans, will open wide in theaters on November 23rd.