Recently invited to Hot Ones, a famous YouTube show based on chicken, peppers and stars, Matt Damon revealed between two well-spiced wings his questions about the future of physical media and its impact on the industry such as we know it today. The news is not new, the DVD and Blu-Ray industry is seriously damaged by the flowering of streaming and SVOD platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and many others. others — involving a change in the consumption of filmic products. This is not to mention the gradual disappearance of disc players on consoles and the embedding of access to said platforms within television itself. This has a concrete impact on income, and therefore film production. The actor says about it: “DVDs represented a significant part of our business, of our income. Today, technologies have made this support obsolete. It used to be that we could afford not to collect a movie’s revenue package on theatrical release, because we knew the DVD was going to come out within six months and we were going to continue to make money from it. this medium. It was like a second cinema outing. Now that DVDs have kind of disappeared, we can’t really make the same films anymore.” He doesn’t hesitate to give a very concrete example to illustrate his point: “For example, I made this film called ‘My Life with Liberace’ [de Steven Soderbergh, ndlr]. When I went to discuss with the executives of the studio, they explained to me that the budget would be around 25 million dollars and that they would have to release an additional 25 million for advertising costs. That brings us back to $50 million. However, half of what is harvested must be returned to the operators. So, concretely, the film has to bring in $100 million for us to start making a profit. So the very idea of raising 100 million dollars with this love story between two men, with people I adore, has become a very difficult bet. But it wouldn’t have been in the 1990s. At the time, we could make these kinds of films.” The actor is well known for his role in The Departed by Martin Scorsese, without forgetting his involvement in the Jason Bourne as well as his investment in the Ocean’s. But what Matt Damon is talking about here is more about independent films, like his collaborations with Gus Van Sant, to whom we owe the iconic Will Hunting, but also Gerry, whom Carlotta has just released in theaters. It remains to be seen whether the fatal prediction of Matt Damon will be verified over time.
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