Jackie Chan Says Studios Are “Business Guys” Obsessed With Money Rather Than Making Good Movies: “Very Difficult To Make A Good Movie Now”

Living legend and action star Jackie Chan has been part of the film industry since the early ’60s and has seen it all, appearing in movies big and small, foreign-made or made in Hollywood. He’s now calling out studios for being too money-obsessed because it impacts the quality of movies being released.

During a Q&A at 78th Locarno Film Festival (via Deadline) Chan (a writer and director himself) spoke of the current state of the film industry, highlighting that a major problem, in his opinion, is with big studios being too obsessed with recouping money or being too concerned about going over production budgets, which in his opinion has a negative impact the quality of movies that are being made.

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“I think the old movies are better than today,” Chan said of the current climate of studio filmmaking. “Right now, a lot of big studios, they’re not filmmakers, they’re business guys. They invest 40 million and think, ‘How can I get it back?’ And you can’t go over. It’s very difficult to make a good movie now.”

Chan added how the movies he made in Hong Kong were able to be made quickly and without much headaches or interference from a financial and creative standpoint, because a lot of the studio/money people were in the dark about what he was doing, including those death-defying stunts that helped earn him his honorary Oscar.

While we all know that the film industry and specifically Hollywood have always been designed as a money-making venture, we’re in the era of major corporations owning and operating studios (alongside streaming services), and we’ve seen a bit of a push-back on some of the more head-scratching bean-counting antics having negative impacts on movies.

An infamous example of that is the day-and-date release attempt (dropping big-budget blockbusters like on both streaming/VOD and theaters on the same day) and David Zaslav‘s tax write-off scheme at Warner Bros. that saw movies like “Batgirl” tossed into the proverbial wood chipper.

Some of the more modern studio money-saving issues coming to the forefront are the threat of artificial intelligence replacing actors/writers, and how digital scans of actors could lead to background extras being slowly removed from the equation, too. Both were highlighted during the recent actors and writers’ strikes.

Most recently, Chan voiced the new iteration of Splinter in the animated flick “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” is still part of the voice cast of the “Kung Fu Panda” movies as Monkey, co-starred in Sony Pictures‘ “The Karate Kid Legends,” that released in theaters earlier this year and is said to be still very interested in returning for “Rush Hour 4” alongside Chris Tucker (questionable if director Brett Ratner is coming back after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment).

You can watch that full conversation with Jackie Chan at Locarno below.