Following the lackluster box office performance of his latest mid-budget spy thriller, “Black Bag,” Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is contemplating his next move.
The director behind acclaimed films like “Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Out of Sight,” and the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise has made nearly every type of movie imaginable, but he’s always felt most comfortable doing a modestly budgeted drama. But the performance of “Black Bag,” which brought in $37 million on a $44 million budget, has the filmmaker reconsidering how he fits into today’s moviemaking landscape.
“The people we needed to come out didn’t come out,” Soderbergh told Business Insider of the “Black Bag” box office numbers. “And unfortunately, it’s impossible to really know why.”
“My concern is that the rest of the industry looks at that result and just goes, ‘This is why we don’t make movies in that budget range for that audience, because they don’t show up,'” he continued. “And that’s unfortunate, because that’s the kind of movie I’ve made my whole career. That middle ground, which we all don’t want to admit is disappearing, seems to be really disappearing.”
The fact that a sexy spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, and Pierce Brosnan that’s Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes couldn’t pull in an audience is particularly confounding to Soderbergh.
“I mean, it’s the best-reviewed movie I’ve ever made in my career, and we’ve got six beautiful people in it, and they all did every piece of publicity that we asked them to do, and this is the result,” he said. “So it’s frustrating.”
Asked if he would ever return to making epic movies like 2008’s “Che,” his two-film biopic starring Benicio del Toro as the revolutionary Che Guevara, Soderbergh wasn’t against it, but he had one caveat.
“It’s really got to be something that deserves that kind of treatment and doesn’t feel like Oscar bait,” he said.
Soderbergh said he currently has nothing in the works that he would characterize as an epic and explained why.
“It does require an aspect of the grandiosity gene; you’ve got to think about yourself a certain way to want to go out and do those things. That is not my default mode,” he said. “I have to work myself up to that because I don’t have that kind of sense of my place.”
Still, he enjoys making epic films when it’s the right move. It even led to the creation of one of his most beloved television series.
“If I hadn’t made ‘Che,’ I don’t think I would have made ‘The Knick,'” which I think is the last epic thing that I’ve done,” Soderbergh said of his acclaimed 2014 Cinemax series starring Clive Owen as a surgeon pushing the boundaries of medicine in 1900s New York.
“‘Che’ was good for me in that sense. But knowing what goes into that, it has got to be something that I feel really electrified by, and those are just hard to come by,” he continued. “Then you’ve got to cast Timothée Chalamet.”
“Black Bag” will be available to stream on Peacock starting May 2.
