Steven Soderbergh Calls ‘Black Bag’ Box Office Performance ‘Frustrating,’ Worries About Impact on the Industry

Steven Soderbergh was frustrated by the underwhelming box office performance of his latest film, “Black Bag,” and he is concerned that its poor earnings could represent a dark sign for Hollywood’s future.

When “Black Bag” hit theaters in March, the film received widespread praise and emerged as one of the most well-reviewed films of the year. Its critical success did not translate financially, though. The film grossed just over $38 million at the worldwide box office, falling short of its reported $50 million budget.

“It was frustrating. The people we needed to come out didn’t come out. And unfortunately, it’s impossible to really know why,” Soderbergh told Business Insider Monday about the spy thriller‘s financial performance. “My concern is that the rest of the industry looks at that result and just goes, ‘This is why we don’t make movies in that budget range for that audience because they don’t show up.'”

“That’s the kind of movie I’ve made my whole career,” Soderbergh continued. “That middle ground, which we all don’t want to admit is disappearing, seems to be really disappearing.”

Soderbergh’s second collaboration this year with screenwriter David Koepp (the other being “Presence”), “Black Bag” stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a pair of married British intelligence officers whose marriage is tested by a spy conspiracy. It is, in other words, the kind of mid-budget, star-studded adult genre film that has become an increasingly rare thing in Hollywood right now.

Its seemingly wide-ranging appeal is one of the reasons why Soderbergh was surprised to see general audiences largely ignore the film. “It’s the best-reviewed movie I’ve ever made in my career, and we’ve got six beautiful people in it and they all did every piece of publicity that we asked them to do,” the filmmaker observed. “This is the result. So it’s frustrating.”

Soderbergh did not blame the film’s performance on its distributor, Focus Features, “I think they did everything right. Going any wider was not going to solve the problem, obviously. They spent the money. I liked the campaign. They were incredibly supportive.” He also noted that Focus did assure him “Black Bag” was going to break even eventually. “I was worried. I don’t like losing people’s money,” he said.

The “Ocean’s Eleven” filmmaker has spent the past several years making mostly straight-to-streaming, modestly-budgeted films like “No Sudden Move,” “Kimi” and “Let Them All Talk.” “Black Bag” is, along with “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and “Presence,” one of the few Soderbergh films from the past six years to be released in theaters.

That fact the film has only made a minimal impact among casual moviegoers is all the more frustrating for the filmmaker. “It’s really not fun when someone asks you, ‘What are you working on?’ and you go, ‘Oh, I just made this thing,’ and they go, ‘Oh, did that come out?'” Soderbergh confessed. “You get tired of that.”

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