After Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag underperformed at the domestic box office despite a strong critical response, the director reflected on the movie’s public reception. In speaking with The Independent, Soderbergh said that the muted reception for his movie is a bad omen for Hollywood more generally.
“This is the kind of film I made my career on,” he said. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theaters — if that’s truly a dead zone — then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”
“I know for a fact, having talked to somebody who works at another studio, that the Monday after Black Bag opened, the conversation in the morning meeting was: ‘What does this mean when you can’t get a movie like this to perform?’ And that’s frustrating,” he continued.
Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as two British spies who begin to do some clandestine work on one another. The movie was released by Focus Features, and Soderbergh said that the studio told him the movie will turn a profit.
Still, “the bottom line is that we need to figure out a way to cultivate this audience for movies that are in this mid-range, that aren’t fantasy spectacles or low-budget horror movies,” the director said. “They’re movies for grown-ups, and those can’t just go away.”
Soderbergh added that many of his most famous movies might not get made today: “Erin Brockovich wouldn’t get made today; Traffic wouldn’t get made. Unless you get Timothée Chalamet who, god bless him, seems to be interested in doing different kinds of movies. But that window is getting smaller and smaller for filmmakers to climb through.”