It isn’t your imagination. The landscape of cinema has definitely shifted over the last decade to the point where (with a few key exceptions) movies don’t even really feel like movies anymore — they feel like future arrivals to streaming service catalogues, and Matt Damon has quite the eye-opening explanation.
“The DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream, and technology has just made that obsolete,” the Hollywood star of Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, and The Bourne Trilogy fame explained to Sean Evans during his appearance on First We Feast’s Hot Ones.
“The movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release, and six months later, you’d get a whole ‘nother chunk. It would be like reopening the movie, almost. When that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make.”
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“I did this movie Behind The Candelabra when I talked to a studio executive who explained it was a $25 million movie, I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it – we call it P&A.”
“So now I’m in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, right? The people who own the movie theatres. So I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit.”
“The idea of making $100 million on a story about a love affair between these two people… yeah, I love everyone in the movie but that’s suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s when they were making all those kinds of movies, the kind of movies that I loved, and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.”
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski also attributes the aforementioned shift of the cinematic landscape to the decline of practical in-camera action versus CGI (as well as other special effects shortcuts).
“Certainly seeing people react to an in-camera, authentically captured film like Top Gun: Maverick makes us all feel good that our approach works and is appreciated by audiences,” Joseph Kosinski told The Wrap.
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“It’s almost funny to me to see people who are so enamoured with real photography. Younger people almost haven’t seen a lot of it. They’re so used to CGI being a tool of big movies that when you shoot something for real, it feels innovative.”
Kosinski added we can expect more of this visual authenticity from his upcoming production starring Brad Pitt, produced by seven-time Formula 1 world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton.
“That’s exactly the approach for Formula One [working title]… to shoot at the real races and real cars and capture it. It’s going to be a huge challenge but an exciting one for me.”
Hear the explanation behind the evolution of modern cinema as told by Matt Damon himself below (14:21).
