Spielberg Predicts an Implosion in the Film Industry

Steven Spielberg, whose directorial efforts have collectively grossed over $8.5 billion worldwide, knows a thing or two about making movies. Consequently, when he prognosticates regarding the future of the industry, it’s worthwhile to listen and take note.

Spielberg did precisely that on a recent visit to the USC campus to commemorate the opening of the university’s School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media Building, accompanied by George Lucas, CNBC anchor Julia Boorstin, and Microsoft VP Don Mattrick.

Spielberg predicted that “big changes” are in store for the film industry in the foreseeable future, what he termed an “implosion.”

His thesis is that fringe, niche projects and ideas tend to get shunted off onto other platforms, like cable television or Netflix, and that as a result, film is increasingly and alarmingly devoted to the tentpole/blockbuster film, the sort of crowd-pleasing ventures that tend to pay off the largest for studios.

What Spielberg hinted at is an inarguable truth: namely, that movies are, at their most fundamental level, a form of art, and that the sort of callous, calculated, focus-group driven efforts that currently drive the film industry are the absolute antithesis of art. Moreover, those efforts are also not foolproof.

Spielberg anticipates a coming time where five or six megabudget studio efforts will fail dramatically, and suggested to the USC audience that this would catalyze an enormous shift in philosophy within the industry. Though his language was premonitory and apocalyptic, there’s really no reason that the sort of looming implosion Spielberg foresees should be viewed in a negative light. By way of analogy, while it’s probably on some level a tragedy for the rats and vermin who have built their homes too close to the Nile River when it floods yearly, it’s no less of a revitalizing, essential blessing for the entire rest of the surrounding ecosystem, dependent as it is on the annual overflowing and the rich, clean ecological slate it provides.

Spielberg is probably right, at least in asserting that the current studio model of unapologetic, unadulterated avarice will likely not continue to accelerate unabated into perpetuity without encountering a major setback at some point, but then again, he has every reason to say so. Reflect on the wise, if insufferably smug, words of Alec Baldwin’s character, Captain George Ellerby, in The Departed: “Qui bono?” Who benefits?

Spielberg and Lucas at several junctures of the event made reference to recent struggles they experienced getting their movies made, a mutually sympathetic pity-party that featured this un-self-aware gem from Lucas, “We’re talking Lincoln and Red Tails — we barely got them into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater.” I’d bet good money that Lucas’s distribution negotiations for the thoroughly mediocre Red Tails included at least a half-dozen utterances of, “do you know who I am?”

So who benefits from Spielberg trashing the blockbuster-driven, studio-based film industry he, himself, helped to build? It’s worth noting that, although he didn’t explicitly mention it to the USC audience at the Interactive Media Building opening, Spielberg is currently working on a TV-esque project for Microsoft and Xbox 360 centered on the Halo universe and the sort of nominally calamitous collapse he predicts for the film industry would not only justify his little side project, but actually benefit it directly.

Ultimately, there is nothing new under the sun. Such a seismic shift as Spielberg predicts may well befall the film industry, perhaps sooner rather than later, but it would only be seen as world-ending or catastrophic to those creatures myopic enough to have built their homes on the very banks of the metaphorical Nile, unprepared for the inevitable — and vital — flood.