With 2020 Hits, Netflix Is Rewriting the Summer Blockbuster Script
The service says 85 million people saw Spenser Confidential. If action movies can work outside the theater, can everything else?
The many screens of Spenser Confidential.
Illustration: 731; Devices: Alamy; Wahlberg and Duke: Netflix
While putting the finishing touches on his latest movie, Spenser Confidential, director Peter Berg worried viewers wouldn’t laugh. The film, an action-comedy modeled after Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, relies on humor to break the tension between explosions and firefights. The movie had thrilled audiences in test screenings. A theater packed with 300 people gave it an average score of 96—the highest of his career. But Spenser Confidential wasn’t going to appear in theaters. It would be available exclusively on Netflix, the world’s most popular paid streaming service.
This is new ground for Berg, the 56-year-old filmmaker behind Hancock and Lone Survivor. In the past two decades he’s directed 11 movies that have collectively grossed more than $1.5 billion at the box office. He attributes their success to the power of a shared experience. When people cried during Patriots Day or Friday Night Lights, their emotion affected everyone in the theater. “I don’t know how those experiences play out when people watch them by themselves, or on a TV or a computer,” Berg says from his home in Los Angeles.