[hangsi]

This is from the interview on Hot Ones (released August 5, 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXma6K9mzo&t=816s

> Sean Evans:

> I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment?

> Matt Damon:

> Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost.

> And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.

[weird-eye-issue]

But there must be residual revenue over time from the streaming services, I guess it's just a lot lower on average?

[CGMthrowaway]

Same thing happened with music and CDs vs streaming

[nervousvarun]

Why bands tour so much more now...only way to make $

[dcrazy]

I thought Behind the Candelabra was a direct to HBO release.

Edit: yes, it was direct to HBO. So maybe Damon was just using it as an example because he knew the production cost off the top of his head.

[overfeed]

This would be congruent with Damon's retelling of how a studio exec walked him through how the math of a traditional theatrical release wouldn't work out for the movie.

[glenngillen]

I guess another way to interpret what he was trying to say could also be:

"the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter (are no longer affordable if I was to do a cinema release)"

So maybe Behind the Candelabra was direct to HBO precisely because of the economics he was pointing out?