Steven Soderbergh Says It’s Time to Tear the Streaming Model Down to the Studs

Most of your recent output has been for streaming. What do you see as the importance of the theatrical business?

I certainly think in cultural terms it's necessary. It's a good thing. It's a good thing for people to go out and see movies together. I think it's a collective good. For people to go out and experience art together in numbers, I think is a good thing. It also provides a potential windfall that doesn't exist in the streaming world, which is you make a movie, and it blows up the way these two movies just blew up over the weekend. It's great that Stranger Things blows up, and it means people are on Netflix instead of somewhere else, and it may result in some signups, but it doesn't bring the kind of pure cash windfall that a movie that makes a billion-and-a-half-dollars does. And so that's the problem. If you're a streamer, you have a show that hit; once everybody has seen it, it's just sitting there. It's not throwing off any more revenue because you're not selling it to anybody else anymore. That is a sort of mathematical chink in the streaming platform economic model. And the same goes for a hit TV show. The inability to really monetize your monster successes, I think is a problem.