Hollywood's 'Black Bag' Problem
Adam White
I finally watched Black Bag this evening and now I'm annoyed that I didn't watch it sooner – and also that I didn't go see it in a theater during its short run. It's really good. A fun, breezy, and brief – a 90-minute movie, imagine that – spy thriller featuring major stars giving great performances. Who says 'no'?
Sadly, a lot of people, it seems. As Black Bag failed to even top the box office upon arrival in one of the worst weeks at the box office in recent memory. And within just a couple of weeks, it was gone – over to streaming on-demand. And now, already, on streaming itself, where I saw it for the price of Peacock.
Black Bag deserves better than this. Steven Soderbergh deserves better than this. We all deserve better than this.
Anyway, watching the film reminded me of this interview with Soderbergh from April that I had saved to read. And, unsurprisingly, it's great. More surprising is how chastened and introspective the director is. This is a person who has won a Palme D’or (yes, the youngest to do so in 1989, which is now seemingly just a year everyone associates with Taylor Swift being born – which itself is a mindfuck in that the most popular person on the planet was born the year Soderbergh won his Palme D’or), a Best Director Oscar (in a year he was nominated in that category twice, which is another mindfuck – that's still wild), and has directed a wide range of both brilliant and massively successful movies.
He thinks that nobody knows who he is these days and he's most likely right! I mean, the man retired in 2013 and has since directed 11 more movies. And he seems to be increasing his pace. Speaking of:
Such a busy run would typically be cause for celebration, but the Soderbergh I meet today is anxious and slightly crestfallen. Despite sterling reviews (“immensely pleasurable,” went our critic Clarisse Loughrey; “it’s renewed my faith in modern cinema,” went Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién), Black Bag collapsed at the box office, and has grossed just $35m to date on a budget of at least $50m. Soderbergh, wearing thick black spectacles and dressed in a grey suit jacket over a fire alarm-red T-shirt, admits to being heartbroken.
“This is the kind of film I made my career on,” he explains. “And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres – if that’s truly a dead zone – then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”
It's absolutely not a good thing for movies that this kind of film can't find an audience. Again, it's great and it should. While I wrote about this very topic back in 2018, writing about Michael Clayton (another absolutely brilliant movie – seriously, one of my all-time favorites – written and directed by another filmmaker in the Soderberghian mould, Tony Gilroy, whom everyone will probably now know as the force behind Andor), it was another George Clooney-led film that hooked me on to Soderbergh while I was still a teenager: Out of Sight.
That movie, which few remember now, wasn't a huge hit, but it was so good that it course-corrected Clooney in Hollywood. He went from a huge TV star making bad movies to a legitimate movie star because of that movie. There is no Ocean's Eleven, which re-teamed the two, without that movie, obviously.
Today, Soderbergh is promoting Black Bag’s home video release – it’s available on-demand now – not only because he believes in the film but because data has shown it’ll make the bulk of its money outside of cinemas. “Everybody at Focus Features [the film’s distributor] has assured me that ultimately Black Bag will be fine and will turn a profit,” he says, “but the bottom line is that we need to figure out a way to cultivate this audience for movies that are in this mid-range, that aren’t fantasy spectacles or low-budget horror movies.” He sighs. “They’re movies for grown-ups, and those can’t just go away.”
They can't. But they can go straight to streaming, which is what seems to be happening. But even there, without the right algorithms, this type of movie may fail to find an audience. In some ways, I think Black Bag will be helped by The Agency, an insanely highly-priced (thanks to another stacked cast) Showtime series also featuring Michael Fassbender as a spy (it's a remake of Le Bureau des Légendes). But it's just wild to think through the ramifications of all this. That a movie's success is based less on its own merits and more on all of these tangential things. I mean, that's obviously always been the case to some extent with marketing. But a movie such as Black Bag would have undoubtedly been a big hit in theaters 30 years ago given the cast, the filmmakers, and the reviews. Now it needs to fight and claw just to be known – and seen. And scene.
His hope, with Black Bag at least, is that people will discover it over time. “I’ve made a lot of things where people don’t see them when they come out, or they’re not happy with them when they come out, then time goes on and they’ve gone, like… oh, actually…” He smirks. “People even like Ocean’s Twelve now!” He thinks back to Out of Sight, which was by no means a big money-maker and briefly had many questioning whether Clooney and Lopez were going to make it as movie stars. “Very quickly it was looked upon kindly and imbued with the qualities of being a hit when it actually wasn’t a hit,” he remembers. “So maybe two years from now people will go, ‘Oh, Black Bag – that was a hit!”
I think Black Bag will stand up well over time. And I'm not just saying that because it checks basically every box I care about – a movie starring a has-been James Bond, a would-be James Bond, and a could-be James Bond (oh yes, and a Moneypenny), in a sort of John le Carré plot, directed by a 90s-era Soderbergh – but because it's a taut, well-made movie. Imagine that mattering.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler