Steven Soderbergh is trying to change the Movie Business.

Christopher L. Inoa
Aug 9, 2017 · 6 min read
Steven Soderbergh (Photo via Collider)

In 2015, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director Steven Soderbergh, two years after his self imposed retirement from feature filmmaking, said this about whether he would ever return to making movies, “Just from my very personal, subjective point of view, I don’t have any interest in making another theatrical film unless my attitude changes or the business changes.”

Logan Lucky, releasing August 18, his first theatrically released film since 2013’s Side Effects — and his first feature-length film since Behind the Candelabra, which premiered on HBO a few months later — shows that his attitude has certainly changed; as for the movie business, eh… not so much, so Soderbergh has decided to change it himself.

With the release of Logan Lucky, Soderbergh is trying to change the way independent movies — the kind that launched his career — are released in theaters.

Starting with 1989’s Sex, Lies & Videotape, which jumpstarted the independent film boom of the early 1990’s, till 2013, Soderbergh has directed over 20 feature films. He’s won the Palme d’Or, the highest award given at the Cannes Film Festival (for Sex, Lies & Videotape), a Best Director Oscar for Traffic (also nominated for Erin Brockovich in the same year) and has directed everything from crime-dramas (Out of Sight) to commercial franchise movies (the Oceans 11 trilogy), to action movies (Haywire) to experimental films (The Girlfriend Experience).

So over his then 20 plus year career, earning accolade after accolade, earning respect from critics and fellow directors, why did he leave it all behind?

In a radio interview with Studio 360, he worried that if he continued directing movies, he would end up looking much like Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards. “You know when you see one of those athletes hang on two seasons too long? It’s kinda sad because you’re last image of them isn’t when they were great.”

On April 2013, two months into his retirement, at the 56th San Francisco Film Festival, where he delivered the keynote speech, he gave another, more critical reason he decided to walk away from the movie business. “There are fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies.” He then went on to say “you’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make.”

So besides not wanting to resemble an aging athlete past his prime, Soderbergh was clearly exasperated with dealing with film executives and their lack of respect for directors. Four years since his statement, it’s hard to disagree with him. Just look at Josh Trank with his failed Fantastic Four reboot; David Ayer with Suicide Squad, Gareth Edwards with Rogue One, Chris Lord and Phil Miller on the Han Solo stand alone film, and Nikolaj Arcel’s with The Dark Tower. Time and time again, studios hire these directors (always men, but that’s another story) to direct these projects, only to take the film away from them and do what they want with it as soon as one test screening doesn’t go according to plan.

Now those films are all $100 million dollar plus tent pole movies, the kind of movies that studios spend a lot of money producing and marketing to make billions of dollars (with the exception of The Dark Tower), not the kind of movies Soderbergh is known for making (mid budgets films aimed at more adult audiences). And if you are a regular visitor to the multiplex, you probably realized that the major Hollywood studios don’t really put out many movies that resemble the kinds of films Soderbergh makes anymore; relying instead on prequels, sequels, reboots, attempts to launch their own franchises or (and I’ve come to hate this word) cinematic universes.

So why would Soderbergh want to release latest film (which he produced under his Fingerprint Releasing production company) in theaters? He could have just went the route of other auteurs like Boon Joon-ho (Okja) and Noah Baumbach (The Meyerwotiz Stories), and just work with Netflix, where the movie would appear on the service and in a few select screens in major coastal cities. From all accounts, Netflix sounds like a great place for a director like Soderbergh to work, seeing as how they seemingly give directors free rein over their projects and provide ample budgets.

That really isn’t Soderbergh’s way of doing things, he’s more into trying new things first, before anyone else. With Logan Lucky, Soderbergh told the New York Times that his goal for this film is to “do what the studios normally do from a wide distribution standpoint, only with a lot fewer resources — spending on marketing — and with much better economic structure for the people who actually made the film.” Or, in more layman terms, “I want movie studios to keep their paws off my money. And I want complete control over how my films are marketed.

What usually happens when someone produces a film independently from the major studios is that to finance the picture, they have to sell the foreign rights to the movie, which Soderbergh did, to raising the $29 million he needed to make Logan Lucky by selling all of the non theatrical rights (streaming, foreign etc.). Now because Soderbergh is a name people recognize, he is able to hire people he’s worked with before like Channing Tatum as well as other big name actors like Adam Driver, Hilary Swank and Daniel Craig, and have them all work for scale; which means that someone like Craig who usually makes $10 million dollars a movie, is probably getting paid $400,000.

That takes care of producing, however distribution and marketing is a whole different story. Under normal circumstances, the independent production company reaches out and pays a studio to market and distribute the film. The studio goes ahead and makes the posters, trailers, TV spots and web advertisements for the movie. All of this is done with no input from the director whatsoever. The studio charges the production company a fee along with deductibles to do this, then the film is given to the theaters, who take a percentage of the films gross; the profits (if there any left after all that) is then given to the production company.

Instead of reaching out to a studio to market and distribute Logan Lucky, Soderbergh instead went to a smaller distribution company (Bleeker Street Media); paid them a one million dollar token fee plus some of the box office profits to do the marketing and distribution. Soderbergh did this because a) he’s paying a lot less than he would if he went to FOX (Logan Lucky is the largest release Bleeker Street Media has ever done) and b) Soderbergh has complete creative control over how the trailer’s posters and all other facets of his movie’s marketing is done, something he has never gotten in his career.

In that same Times article, it is noted that most of the physical marketing is being done in states in the South and Midwest, not in the more traditional places you see mass amounts of advertising for a movie, such as NY and LA. Soderbergh wanted to keep marketing costs as low as possible, which is a different tactic than Hollywood studios have been doing for years (if you live in NY, try to remember how many posters you saw of The Mummy on the subway two months before the film’s release).

Soderbergh is known for trying new things. His first gig after retiring was directing all 20 episodes of the Cinemax period hospital drama The Knick. True, Soderbergh wasn’t the first to do this for an American TV series; Cary Fukanga directed all of the episodes of True Detective Season One, but Soderbergh not only directed each episode of The Knick but also served as his own cinematographer and editor

While working on The Knick, Soderbergh started sharing his editing experiments through his official site. Videos where he made changes or complete recut classic films such as Raiders of The Lost Ark, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Heaven’s Gate and Psycho — mashing up both Alfred Hitchcock’s and Gus Van Sant’s versions.

If Soderbergh were to succeed, this could have lasting changes to how independent filmmakers release their films in the future. Logan Lucky doesn’t have to make Wonder Woman levels of money; it could make just $100 million dollars domestically — the kind of numbers that would lead to firings for a major studio picture — and Soderbergh’s experiment will be a rousing success, inspiring other filmmakers like himself to take similar routes with their next films. Soderbergh could be responsible for a second boom in independent filmmaking as he did almost thirty years ago. And if he doesn’t succeed, well it’s good to have Steven Soderbergh making movies again — he’s currently working on a film he made in secret, filmed on his iPhone and a movie based on The Panama Papers — and you know, there’s always Netflix.

Christopher L. Inoa

Freelance reporter and critic. Have written features, essays, and reviews for Polygon, The Film Stage, Syfy Wire, and Fandor.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade