Steven Spielberg has made a significant mark on the film industry thanks to his many blockbuster hits. Given that he’s kept his pulse on Hollywood, Spielberg has kept a watchful eye over trends in cinema over the years.
But there was a time when his assessment of Hollywood didn’t yield good news for audiences.
Why Steven Spielberg warned about a potential implosion in the film industry
Spielberg’s movies have helped Hollywood’s growth for decades. The director was responsible for a wide variety of commercial and critical hits that explored nearly every genre in the film industry.
But although he was responsible for a large roster of hits, Spielberg believed that modern blockbuster movies might cause unwanted changes to cinema as a whole. Especially at a time when quite a few blockbuster movies weren’t performing as well as they were expected to.
“There’s eventually going to be an implosion, or a big meltdown… where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm,” Spielberg once said on Film Students (via Independent).
Spielberg was worried this shift might have resulted in high ticket prices for certain kinds of movies.
“You’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man,” Spielberg said. “You’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.”
Steven Spielberg felt one of the most dominant genres in the film industry might go the way of the Western
Over the past couple of decades, superhero films have become huge money makers for cinema. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was instrumental in the rise of this genre. Some in the film industry, however, felt these superhero blockbusters had a shelf life. The theory was that this genre may be replaced with another genre as Hollywood’s dominant money maker. Matt Damon once even expressed concern that this shift didn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.
Spielberg was one of a few in entertainment who bought into this possibility. The director believed that it was only a matter of time before superhero movies experienced the same fate as another popular genre.
“We were around when the Western died and there will be a time when the superhero movie goes the way of the Western. It doesn’t mean there won’t be another occasion where the Western comes back and the superhero movie someday returns,” Spielberg once told The Associated Press (via Yahoo).
Spielberg’s opinion didn’t seem to come from a negative reflection on the film industry. But rather, the Schindler’s List director just felt it was a natural course that most big-budget genres followed.
“Of course, right now the superhero movie is alive and thriving. I’m only saying that these cycles have a finite time in popular culture. There will come a day when the mythological stories are supplanted by some other genre that possibly some young filmmaker is just thinking about discovering for all of us,” he said.
Steven Spielberg once felt these types of movies shouldn’t have been eligible for the Oscars
The Academy Awards usually selected movies they felt were of a certain standard as Oscar-nominees. But Spielberg once believed films that ended up on Netflix instead of the theater weren’t supposed to be Oscar-contenders. The Oscar-winner himself felt only films that appeared on the big screen should’ve been considered for nominations.
“I don’t believe that films that are given token qualifications, in a couple of theaters for less than a week, should qualify for Academy Award nominations,” he once said in an interview with ITV News. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie. If it’s a good show, you deserve an Emmy. But not an Oscar.”
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