LET THEM ALL TALK. It certainly wasn’t the biggest (or worst) news of the year but the recent announcement by Warner Bros. that the studio would be releasing its entire 2021 slate simultaneously in theaters and on the HBOMax streaming platform has produced no small amount of hand-wringing and outcry. Prominent directors — including Christopher Nolan, whose insistence that his Tenet be released theatrically in the midst of the pandemic may well have heralded the death of the modern moviegoing experience — have mounted the battlements to decry the decision, both in the name of art and of commerce. And rightfully so, if they’re being genuine about it. One wonders, though, whether the scramble to renegotiate paydays funded primarily by gross-profit percentages (back-end points) is more central to the backlash than reverence for the medium. Regardless, the movie industry, like so many others, seems to be teetering on the brink of precipitous change. To what that change will finally amount remains unknowable, at least from where I sit. It does seem abundantly clear, though, that things will be different in the not-so-distant future; a great number of people with skin in the game do not like it. Not so Steven Soderbergh, ever the pragmatist and, increasingly, one of the clearer-eyed commentators on the business of cinema. As he has watched the market share for the stuff he wants to make — challenging, modestly-scaled movies for grown-ups — grow ever smaller within the conventional system of production and distribution, he has sought out other avenues, first in prestige television series and features, and now in the comparatively wide-open zone of streaming. Having made two movies for Netflix (High Flying Bird and The Laundromat, both 2019), he has now signed a contract with HBOMax (and whatever corporate juggernaut owns it) to direct three features for that service, Let Them All Talk being the first of them. He has also spoken quite plainly on the business of movies, most recently to the notion that huge-scale theatrical releases will not disappear; there is simply too much money to be made. But, as we’ve observed for years now, the top-loading of the schedule with franchise entries expected to earn a billion dollars has crushed the mid-to-low budget segment of the market, while simultaneously training audiences to crave the sugar-rush instant gratification of those tent-poles. A movie like Let Them All Talk (or really any of…



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