No lie, a lot of the time, Ben Affleck talks away too much. Like the man doesn’t know when to shut up and most of the time we’re rolling our eyes at his inability to know when to not speak.
Especially after his comments about his ex, Jennifer Garner, this week. His media coach obviously didn’t teach him that if shit can be taken badly out of context, don’t say it. Just shhhh….
But we were glad to hear his thoughts on The Last Duel. As we all know, Ridley Scott blamed millennials for the fact that The Last Duel underperformed at the box office.
“Ridley Scott blamed millennials for The Last Duel underperforming, what’s your take?” the THR asked him.
His answer was five minutes long. No offense to Ben, but five minutes is a long fucking answer and no one really wants to hear you talk that much. However, in something that we never thought that we’d say about Ben, he had some valid shit to say.
“Really, the truth is that I’ve had movies that didn’t work that bombed, that weren’t good. It’s very easy to understand that and why it happened. The movie is shit, people don’t want to see it, right? This movie, The Last Duel, I really like. It’s good and it plays — I saw it play with audiences and now it’s playing well on streaming. It wasn’t one of those films that you say, ‘Oh boy, I wish my movie had worked.’ Instead, this is more due to a seismic shift that I’m seeing, and I’m having this conversation with every single person I know. Though there are various iterations, the conversation is the same: How is the movie business changing?” he said.
He kept talking, “One of the fundamental ways it’s changing is that the people who want to see complicated, adult, non-IP dramas are the same people who are saying to themselves, ‘You know what? I don’t need to go out to a movie theater because I’d like to pause it, go to the bathroom, finish it tomorrow.’ It’s that, along with the fact that you can watch with good quality at home. It’s not like when I was a kid and the TV at home was an 11-inch black-and-white TV. I mean, you can get a 65-inch TV at Walmart for $130. There’s good quality out there and people are at home streaming in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. It’s all changed.”
Ben continued, “And you know what? I knew it was changing before the pandemic hit with The Way Back. I remember feeling like, shit, I really love this movie, and no one’s going to see it. I could just tell; it’s not going to land in the theaters. People don’t want to go see dramas. Then the pandemic hit, and ironically, one of the first few films that was rushed to streaming was The Way Back, and people did see it. I said, ‘You know what? This isn’t bad.’ I would rather have people see this and watch it, and I don’t need to be stuck to the old ways [of doing business].”
This is right guys, Batfleck has some valid points. But we did tune him a little, no lie.
He ended off with some valid points, “A lot of the time, and I’m even guilty of this myself, I can lament it. I went to see one movie theatrically. That movie was Licorice Pizza. There are probably two or three directors, people like Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, who have people saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to see two or three movies in the theater this year, I’ll go see theirs.’ I think you’re going to see 40 movies at least [released] each year now. When Gone Baby Gone came out [a 2007 film directed by Ben Affleck and starring Casey Affleck], there were something like 600 movies being released every year. We had seven movies debuting on the same weekend. It was really difficult, and I think maybe [The Last Duel] would’ve done better on streaming because the way [studios and streamers] have of identifying and marketing directly to people who like it is really effective. For God’s sake, think of this movie, [The Tender Bar], I mean, Amazon has an enormous reach. Everybody uses Amazon. They may be buying groceries, refrigerators, whatever, but they still use it and you can reach people that way. I think you have to adapt with the times or you risk becoming a dinosaur, as my children tell me.”
For more on Affleck making sense, well happy digging into his interviews to find that.