Mad Max Director Says Movies Releasing First on Streaming Is Painful

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George Miller, the Oscar-winning director of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road says that it would be very painful to him if his films were released first on a streaming platform. Miller’s filmmaking career kicked off in 1979 with the release of Mad Max, the first entry in what was to become a landmark franchise. The film also introduced then-unknown actor Mel Gibson to audiences around the world. In the years since, Miller has found plenty of acclaim outside of the world of Mad Max.

There’s little arguing against the fact that the Mad Max films – and in particular Fury Road – are greatly enhanced by seeing them on the big screen. Fury Road’s spectacular visual storytelling may have been over the top at times, but it’s also exactly what made the film so engaging and fun to watch. In an era in which subscription streaming services have become the norm, a spectacle film like Fury Road was still able to convince people that the trip to the theater was a worthwhile one. Unfortunately, as if the cinematic release model wasn’t already suffering, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it difficult – even outright impossible at times – to see films in cinemas.

Miller stands by insisting on the need for audiences to experience his films in cinemas first and foremost. With his latest effort, the wild dramatic-fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing, having recently premiered out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Miller spoke about the importance of the theatrical release. Like several of this summer’s bigger releases, Three Thousand Years of Longing will release exclusively in theaters. As he told Variety, a streaming release would have been “very painful” for him:

“It would be very painful to know that your movie will be first seen on streaming. There’s a commitment that they can’t change. MGM will release it at the end of August in 2,000 cinemas. There’s been no deal that MGM has made to stream the movie. At this moment, it will be a theatrical release. Seeing it in that cinema [the Palais], with that sound, that group of people, and knowing every little bit of work that we put into it, will be available to the audiences.”

Miller certainly isn’t alone in expecting his films to be released through the traditional model. In the years since subscription streaming services became the dominant form of release for so many films, highly respected filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese have all griped publicly about the prospect. As a matter of fact, Tarantino even went as far as to say that releasing streaming-only films is depressing. It’s an understandable opinion, considering how cinema impacted the lives of these filmmakers and what an essential part of the medium the experience of sitting in a dark theater is.

Conversely, there are those who would argue that times change and cinema changes with it. The advent of sound in film, for example, meant that the silent film era was over and that new avenues of cinema would be explored. But to actually sit down in a theater to experience the sorts of films that George Miller makes is undeniably a special experience. The coming years will certainly be divisive ones for how cinema is viewed, with filmmakers like Miller not about to give up on what they love.

[Silent Watcher]

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