The pandemic has forced a reckoning in the film industry, or at least that’s what countless of articles and industry analysts have said in the past year. A change to how movies are made, and even what types of movies get made at all is about to hit Hollywood, but Ben Affleck argues that this change was already happening before we got stuck at home for months at a time.
In a recent actors roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, Affleck shared what he thought the business will be like after things return to a sense of normalcy. “The business was changing a lot already. Dramas were largely going away theatrically, having to do with competition from extraordinary stuff on streaming services, being hard to price, and the expense of getting adults out of the house on weekends,” Affleck explained.
“Now people have been taught that they can just watch at home and that’s fine, so I think it’ll be very hard to get those kinds of movies back in theaters. If I had to guess, in 2006 there were 300 movies released theatrically, and — excluding qualifying theatrical runs and stuff like that — there’ll probably be 40 movies a year that come out [going forward], mostly action, effects, tentpole sequels and superhero, that kind of movie that you can really count on.”
It’s hard not to agree with the actor/director. In a recent installment of Variety’s “Directors on Directors” conversation series, Ben Affleck and David Fincher discussed how hard it would be for a conventional studio to be persuaded into releasing a movie like “Mank.” As Affleck puts it, “I would point to this movie as the prime example of what is great about a Netflix, which is that they’ll make it. I don’t know that this movie gets made at Warners.”
