Quotes of Quotes (XXX) – Joe Russo about the Social Future of Movies and TV

“Quotes of Quotes”-Stammgäste Joe und Anthony Russo haben bei einem Q&A zu Civil War, das im Podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour vorkam, wieder mal bewiesen, dass sie klüger sind als ihre Filme. Joe Russo antwortete auf die Frage, warum sie vom Fernsehen ins Kino gewechselt sind zu einer Zeit als viele andere gute Regisseure den umgekehrten Weg gehen:

Why we stayed in television so long is because the independent scene we chased in the 90s was dying in the feature space. They started hiring those voices to work in television. For years TV was shackled by the Nielsen Ratings. A great way to make curmudgeonized television is to try to cater to advertising dollars. Once the Nielsen Ratings started to die with the advent of TiVo and cable where there was less of a monetary metric for TV shows, you started to get more and more interesting programming. TV, now at the advent of Netflix and Amazon, which are cash-rich companies, when you look at their valuation compared to the valuation of NBC, it’s massive. Netflix is ten times as rich of a television studio. The only metric they have for their TV shows is whether or not it incites a cultural conversation. It has nothing to do with numbers anymore, it has nothing to do with advertising dollars, so the content is getting more and more aggressive in tone, more experimental, smarter, funnier, more interesting. (…)

What’s happening in the feature space, because TV is becoming so interesting, everybody is trying to make this cinematic universe, where they’ve got big branded IP, because to get you out of your house – because you can just sit there and binge-watch House of Cards or Game of Thrones or Season 2 of Mr Robot – where you’re gonna spend a lot of money to go to a theater, for a babysitter, to buy dinner, 200 Dollars by the time you get home, they’ve got to give you an experience that you can’t get on television. So it’s spectacle cinema. It’s also interwoven stories. I think, why Marvel is a bit of the future of what’s gonna happen to the feature space, is because we’re all giving an emotional investment to these characters that spans years of our lives. And that incites a cultural conversation. That’s the most important commodity moving forward: Are you talking about it? Who are you talking about it with? How much are you talking about it? (…)

So I think you’ll see, over the next ten years, that movies are going to move into a grander, more event-filled, interwoven storytelling direction. And I think you’re gonna see TV getting more and more experimental and you’re gonna see movies that traditionally would have shown up in a cinema show up on Netflix or Amazon.

Die entscheidende Frage ist: Wie wird sich das Kino als Raum und Ort des Filmerlebnisses dieser Entwicklung anpassen? Das Thema habe ich ja auch mit Lucas im Podcast schon gestreift – also werde ich vermutlich bald auch hier etwas Längeres dazu schreiben.