There are a lot of labels you can throw at Steven Soderbergh. Award-winning filmmaker? Definitely. Prolific? Dozens of directing, writing, and producing gigs would confirm this. Eclectic? This is the guy that directed “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “Logan Lucky,” “Erin Brockovich,” and “Traffic,” so yeah he doesn’t tend to stick with the same genre at all. But perhaps the label that best describes Soderbergh as a filmmaker is “trailblazer.”
No, not in the sense that he’s some sort of activist or any political leader. But in the literal sense that he’s the guy that is willing to try new forms of distribution, marketing, filmmaking, and editing before most others. And that continues on with his latest project for the experimental streaming service, Quibi.
Deadline is reporting that Soderbergh has signed on to produce a new short-form series for Jeffrey Katzenberg’s upcoming streaming venture Quibi. No plot details were given, but it appears that the filmmaker was sold on the idea of the streaming service before having a project to pitch.
“Steven Soderbergh signed on yesterday to produce something for us because literally when he saw one of the incredible aspects of this dual asset that Meg [Whitman] was talking about, he said ‘Well, that’s a new type of storytelling, ya know, let me in. So he and his partner Mike Sugar are actually producing one of the things that we had greenlit because of the attributes of how you can shoot this,” said Katzenberg.
For those that aren’t familiar with every single start-up streaming service, Quibi is different than the typical Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu model in a couple of key areas. First, the content on Quibi is made specifically to fit in 7 to 10-minute chunks, with a lot of the content being streaming series and some actually being films broken up into bits. The other major difference is that Quibi is geared almost exclusively for mobile platforms like tablets and smartphones, which allows for the quick content to be viewed on the go.
READ MORE: Why Steven Soderbergh Sent ‘High Flying Bird’ To Netflix Instead Of Theaters
And we all know that Soderbergh sure does love his mobile technology, as he’s made multiple films with iPhones, including “Unsane” and this year’s “High Flying Bird,” which debuted on Netflix.
As alluded to earlier, trying to narrow down exactly what Soderbergh will do within the confines of Quibi is next to impossible. You have to assume it’ll be shot on a smartphone, but really, the most interesting aspect of Soderbergh’s involvement is how he will likely be the guy that figures out some new, previously unused method for creating on the platform.
Needless to say, we’ll be watching out for this.