Steven Soderbergh”s new film Bubble marks a big moment of disruption for the Hollywood Movie Machine, but not in the way the studios and theater chains think.
Bankrolled by Mark Cuban and simultaneously released in Cuban”s Landmark Theatres chain, shown on his HDNet and made available on DVD
Hollywood reporters jumped on this and started asking will people stop going out to movies now? An interesting question to ask, but it misses the point of the Bubble experiment altogether.
Sure, it”s significant that an Oscar-winning director with a $644 million box office history would embrace a different distribution model, but after watching it last night (I timed my NetFlix to get it on the Tuesday release date) it seems what Soderbergh and Cuban are trying to do is change the definition of “movie” altogether.
Consider:
- Shot in HD video and made for just $1.6 million, Bubble looks and feels like a movie shot on film. Soderbergh goes out of his way to include scenes – difficult lighting, shadows, subtle colors – that would normally look horrible on video to prove the viability of the HD video format. In 1989, Soderbergh spent $1 million to shoot sex, lies, and videotape on film and it looks like an art-student movie. The point: Quality production is possible on a tiny budget.
- All of the “actors” in Bubble are actually regular people who live in the Ohio town where the movie was shot. The performances are very good and very real. The point: You don”t need actors to make a good film.
- With Bubble, Soderbergh specifically set out to tell a story (miserable people working in a doll factory in Ohio) that”s way, way outside the Hollywood mold. The point: There are lots of untapped stories for filmmakers in America to tell.
- Bubble”s “simultaneous release” in theaters and on DVD is more of a PR move than a real distribution model. The film made $70,000 in theaters over the weekend, which is equal to about 3,500 DVD sales. The release got the film and Cuban”s all-digital theater chain a lot of press, but ultimately this is a direct-to-consumer – DVD, iTunes – product. The point: You don”t need studio distribution to succeed.
Will Bubble change Hollywood? No. People whose brains are best stimulated by cars driving fast, things blowing up and the good-looking man kissing the good-looking woman at the end of the film will still be most satisfied staring at a huge screen with other like-minded, loud, smelly people.
But what Bubble will do is spur an alternate reality: If you have a story to tell, the vision to film it and can raise a little money, there are now ways for your work to be seen.
By directing Bubble (and five more Cuban-backed films to come), Soderbergh is leveraging his name and reputation to foster this new model.
And Soderbergh knows better than anybody how disrupting the norm can open doors in Hollywood. It was sex, lies, and videotape, after all, that proved the power of great story telling, created a market for independent films and opened doors for Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith and others.
