A couple of months ago it was widely reported that Steven Spielberg had predicted that the superhero movie would soon go the way of the Western, sparking various big names to come out in defence of the genre. However, Spielberg has since moved to clarify his comments, stating that he was simply reflecting on the way various cinematic genres have their moment in the sun.
"To clarify, I didn’t predict the implosion of the film industry at all," said Spielberg, during a Bridge Of Spies press day. "I simply predicted that a number of blockbusters in one summer - those big sort of tentpole superhero movies - there was going to come a time where two or three or four of them in a row didn’t work. That’s really all I said. I didn’t say the film industry was ever going to end because of it. I was simply saying that I felt that that particular genre doesn’t have the legs or longevity of the Western, which was around since the beginning of film and only started to wither and shrivel in the sixties."
"I was also trying to make the point that there was room for every kind of movie today," he continues. "Because there seems to be an audience for everything. Even five years ago there wasn’t an audience for everything. But now, these little movies are just squeezing in and finding a berth next to these huge Queen Mary type movies and they’re able to find an audience, enough of an audience to encourage the distributor and the film companies to finance more of them. These are not just films like Bridge Of Spies, it’s independent movies as well."
So there you go – perhaps those Spielberg Hates Spandex headlines were a little premature after all. In the meantime, we can look forward to Bridge Of Spies which will open in the US on October 16 2015 and the UK on November 27 2016.
