I agree with Spielberg, but I don't think this massive shift is limited to just the movie industry. TV, publishing, radio, even theatre ... everything is changing now. I still think it's a direct result of the Internet.
The way entertainment is accessed, selected, marketed, discussed, distributed, developed, and sold to the public has changed so dramatically in the last 15 years. It's mind-boggling.
With so many choices and so many pipelines, the "big guns" have to find some way of standing out. Some way of justifying a huge ticket price, huge stars, and a huge budget. So they go BIGGER.
Broadway is just as bloated. It's just as tough for a small musical to make it on Broadway as a small film to be distributed by a major studio.
The one thing I think Spielberg got a bit wrong is his "grass is always greener" idea that running to a premium cable TV channel is his best solution. TV is just as much in a state of flux as the film industry, if not more so.
Look at recent HBO "winners" like Mildred Pierce, John Adams, and Boardwalk Empire. They are all successes, but reach a fraction of the audience of something like E.T.
The days when Spielberg's E.T. played for a year and four months in theatres is gone. He was right at the edge of the home entertainment market. VHS tapes were still fairly new, and there was no Internet (to speak of) then. We will never see the likes of an E.T. "event" movie again.
They may charge $25-50 to see an "Iron Man"-type movie in the theatres, but it will run only 6-10 weeks (if that). These massive Blockbusters of today must strike while the iron (man) is hot. Because four minutes from now, that movie is going to be available "on demand," on disc, on cable, etc. And with so many options and so much money spent to keep a film like that in the public eye, they can't afford to do it for more than a few weeks to a few months after it opens.
Times change. There will never be another "Gone With the Wind" event movie either. It's still the most attended theatrical movie ever, and it will always be. Because there was no TV back then, no Internet, no home entertainment releases, and few (if any) movies were even re-released in the theatres back in 1939. It was a "now or never" scenario, so the movie ran for 2 1/2 years (and longer) when it first came out.
Never again.
I don't think any of this is a bad thing. It's just time for another reinvention of the industry. And they will reinvent themselves.
Because the bottom line is that people will still want entertainment, and they will still pay for it. They may access it in ways that haven't even been invented yet and haven't even been thought of yet. But there will always be consumers willing to pay for new entertainment.
"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
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