Steven Spielberg on why he found ‘Elvis’ by Baz Luhrmann “encouraging”
Steven Spielberg remains dedicated to the traditional theatregoing experience. Although the legendary American director might have signed a production deal with Netflix in 2021, he spent years rallying against streaming services and the changing landscape of film. As recently as 2018, Spielberg felt that movies should stay in theatres.
“[TV] is a challenge to cinema the same way television in the early 1950s pulled people away from movie theaters and everybody stayed home, because it was more fun to stay home and watch a comedy on television in the 1950s than it was to go out and see a movie,” Spielberg told ITV in 2018. “So Hollywood’s used to that, we’re accustomed to being highly competitive with television.”
“The difference today is that a lot of studios would rather just make branded, tentpole, guaranteed box office hits from their inventory of branded successful movies than take chances on smaller films,” He added. “And those smaller films the studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon and Hulu and Netflix,” he added.
Three years later, Spielberg’s opinion hadn’t changed much. The Covid-19 pandemic seemed to give him a new perspective on the importance of streaming services, but he still felt a personal grudge against them. To Spielberg, services like Netflix and Hulu were still taking opportunities away from his peers.
“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 told The New York Times. “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.”
Although he acknowledged that the pandemic forced film fans to find new ways to view movies, Spielberg was still looking for more traditional signs of life well after the initial wave of theatre closures. He found it in an unlikely breakthrough: 2022 Baz Luhrmann movie Elvis.“I found it encouraging that Elvis broke $100 million at the domestic box office,” he 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.”
