“Avatar: Fire and Ash” director James Cameron is weighing in on who should — and definitely shouldn’t — be the winning bidder in the highly publicized sale of Warner Bros. Discovery. The company currently has major offers on the table from Netflix, the newly merged Paramount Skydance, and Comcast.
Last week, during an appearance on Matt Belloni’s podcast “The Town,” the “Titanic” filmmaker echoed many industry experts’ view that Paramount, now under the direction of David Ellison, should be the next owner of Warner Bros. But he went one step further, saying point-blank that Netflix taking over the studio “would be a disaster.”
“Sorry, Ted [Sarandos], but geez,” Cameron said, referring to the CEO of the streaming giant. “Sarandos has gone on the record saying theatrical films are dead. ‘Theatrical is dead. Quote, unquote.’”
Cameron also criticized Sarandos’ publicly expressed belief that going to the theater to watch films is “an outmoded idea” for the majority of people — as well as Netflix’s habit of releasing its top-tier features, like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” and Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog,” for very limited runs in order to qualify them for Oscars consideration.
Cameron also addressed Sarandos’ claim that if Netflix acquired Warner Bros., the streamer would continue to release the studio’s films in theaters. “It’s sucker bait,” Cameron said. “‘We’ll put the movie out for a week, we’ll put it out for 10 days, we’ll qualify it for Academy Awards consideration.’ See, I think that’s fundamentally rotten at the core. A movie should be made as a movie for theatrical. And the Academy Awards to me mean nothing if they don’t mean theatrical, and I think they’ve been co-opted, and I think it’s horrific.”
Cameron also said Netflix should be required to put in more effort toward a traditional moviegoing experience in order to qualify films for the Oscars.
“They should be allowed to compete if they put the movie out for a meaningful release — in 2,000 theaters, for a month,” he said, and then balked at Belloni pointing out that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently expanded its rules for films to be considered for Best Picture.
Cameron isn’t the only filmmaker to quibble with Netflix’s limited theatrical runs. Ahead of the November 26 release of “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” director Rian Johnson expressed frustration on X about how few theaters were set to show the latest installment in the franchise, although he didn’t call out the streamer by name.
Meanwhile, some creatives with a penchant for big-budget movies, like Cameron’s good friend Guillermo del Toro — director on Netflix’s Oscar contender “Frankenstein” — and “Narnia” filmmaker Greta Gerwig seem to be satisfied with the trade-offs of working with the deep-pocketed streamer.
