Spielberg Says He’ll Make a Netflix Film Once They Bring Back DVDs

Steven Spielberg has a straightforward answer for anyone who wants to know his terms for working with Netflix: bring back their DVD model.

In an interview with ITV News published on June 8, the director said he would only take on a Netflix project if the platform went back to its roots of delivering DVDs to people’s homes.

“So, the idea of sending little cassettes, little DVDs, you know, to individuals to watch a movie — if I did that, I would be happy to work for Netflix and make a movie for Netflix, knowing that it’s only going to be seen by millions of people on their home screens,” he said. “But I’m a movie maker, and I believe in big motion picture, 70-millimeter theatrical experiences.”

Spielberg has notoriously been anti-streaming for close to a decade. In a 2018 interview with Variety, he argued that streaming-first films should not qualify for Academy Award consideration. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” he said at the time. “If it’s a good show, you deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar.”

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The interview also touched on his forthcoming film Disclosure Day, which opens in the US on June 11. Spielberg said his interest in government UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UFO) disclosures was reignited around 2017 when mainstream news outlets began treating the subject seriously, which eventually inspired a 50-page treatment he developed before enlisting Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp to write the script. The film stars O’Connor as a cybersecurity whistleblower, Emily Blunt as a meteorologist, Colin Firth as a corporate executive, and Colman Domingo as a disclosure movement leader.

On the subject of alien life becoming public knowledge, Spielberg theorized that some people would accept the news without disruption, while others “will feel an ontological shock of social dislocation, that this is turning what I consider to be a fundamental reality upside down and would not handle it well.”