Only a few days ago, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins made it clear that she’s got no interest in helming a movie made exclusively for streaming. While a perfectly acceptable point of view, and one shared by countless filmmakers across Hollywood, Jenkins has doubled down with an even more scathing assessment.
The theatrical experience is vital to the industry, something that should never be superseded by streaming; though, the pandemic has been hugely important for a lot of people when it comes to their films managing to find any sort of audience at all.
Christopher Nolan has criticized Netflix, but that hasn’t stopped the company’s boss from admitting he’s going to make a play for his next feature, anyway, while the likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and more have all collaborated with streamers at one time or another.
However, Jenkins isn’t having any of it. In a new interview, she fired more shots at the landscape, which in turn disparaged anybody to have either produced a movie for a platform, and those to have seen their efforts pulled from theaters and distributed exclusively on a subscription-based service.
“By the way, aren’t you seeing it? All the films that streaming services are putting out, I’m sorry, they look like fake movies to me. I don’t hear about them, I don’t read about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness.”
Netflix’s Best Picture nominees Roma, The Irishman, Marriage Story, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Mank, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom would surely disagree with Jenkins’ opinion, and it’s not a shock to discover that her comments have received plenty of backlash online. It’s an elitist point of view, and an ironic one when you remember Jenkins directed a movie that pasted David Thewlis’ face onto an unconvincing CGI body, and then turned Kristen Wiig into a reject from Cats in the sequel.
