Steven Soderbergh worries about fate of mid-budget movies at the B.O.
Steven Soderbergh has always been a champion of all things cinema: low-budget indies, franchise blockbusters, even those weirdo mid-budget flicks that it feels like have disappeared in the age of the MCU and the like. If you take a look at the highest-grossing movies of the year so far, only one has a budget below $100 million (Sinners), with the rest rounded out by IPs the studio will chuck money at knowing they’ll get their return soon enough. So of course Soderbergh is concerned about the state of the mid-budget.
Steven Soderbergh pointed to his own Black Bag – which had a budget around $50-60M and failed to recoup (even though it’s a damn good movie) – as a recent example of why studios might be hesitant to push for mid-budget fare. In a recent sitdown with Aziz Ansari, he wondered what can get people to the cinema for such movies. “This is the trick: Can you get people to leave the couch and go? I feel like through timing and content, you’re teed up for [Good Fortune] to perform. The industry is in such a state of precarity. When you’ve made something that doesn’t fit into the category of what people think is “working”—which means large-scale fantasy, IP, low-budget horror—if you’re not one of those, when something works or doesn’t work, people tend to look at it not just as an individual piece of art, but as a symbol of what’s happening in the film business at large. And that’s not necessarily a fair thing to lay at the feet of a filmmaker who’s just trying to make a good movie. But all that is to say, I’d be greatly encouraged if this works, because then people go, “We can make these.” The fear that I had, certainly with Black Bag when it underperformed, is people say, “See? Can’t do that. Can’t make a mid-level budget movie for grownups. Nobody shows up.” And then I feel like, “Sh*t, I’ve screwed the pooch for the person behind me.””
One of the people behind him is Ansari, who Soderbergh was chatting with for Interview Magazine on the cusp of his directorial debut, Good Fortune, hitting theaters on October 17th. While it has a modest budget of $30 million, it will objectively have a hard time crossing $10 million on opening weekend despite a cast of himself, Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves.
Why do you think mid-budget movies have such a hard time finding an audience at the cinema? Does the problem lie more with the studios or the audience?
The post Steven Soderbergh worries about fate of mid-budget movies at the B.O. appeared first on JoBlo.