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Despite the overwhelmingly positive response to Steven Soderbergh’s marriage-on-the-rocks espionage thriller, Black Bag, the box office returns have been less than thrilling. Bringing in about $40 million on a $50 million budget, Black Bag is still in the red, though this thing will clean up on airplanes and VOD, so Hollywood accounting lives to fight another day. Still, the lack of a clean box office win doesn’t spell good news for the next director who wants to make a sexy spy movie with an all-star cast, and Soderbergh knows it.
Speaking to The Independent, Soderbergh says that while “everybody at Focus Features has assured me that ultimately Black Bag will be fine and will turn a profit,” the movie’s box office performance has prompted uncomfortable questions. “I know for a fact, having talked to somebody who works at another studio, that the Monday after Black Bag opened, the conversation in the morning meeting was: ‘What does this mean when you can’t get a movie like this to perform?'”
“This is the kind of film I made my career on,” he says. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres – if that’s truly a dead zone – then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”
As many have said, Soderbergh says films like Traffic and Erin Brockovich “wouldn’t get made today,” that is, “unless you get Timothée Chalamet, who, god bless him, seems to be interested in doing different kinds of movies.” Nevertheless, Black Bag is good enough to survive this box office hiccup. “I’ve made a lot of things where people don’t see them when they come out, or they’re not happy with them when they come out. People even like Ocean’s Twelve now! So maybe two years from now, people will go, ‘Oh, Black Bag – that was a hit!'”
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