Kumail Nanjiani’s dance card has been full since his 2017 hit “The Big Sick,” with projects on the way like the odd-couple comedy “Stuber,” the Issa Rae team-up “The Lovebirds,” and Marvel’s soon-to-shoot “The Eternals.” Still, for my project on the future of movies, Nanjiani aired some candid concerns about where the industry is headed. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What feels different to you about our current moment that wasn’t true just a few years ago?
We’re actively talking about diversity a lot more in terms of leads and writers and directors. The other thing is that it seems harder for midsize and smaller movies to do well at the movie theater. I read a stat somewhere that the average person goes to the movie theater around four times a year, and what happens is that these huge movies come out and kind of suck up all the air. You look at comedy especially, and it’s been pretty tough going for comedies at the box office for the last couple years. I think it’s because there’s this sense that only certain movies are worthy of watching at the movie theater.
Does that create an opportunity for streamers?
It does seem that they’re taking a lot more chances on those midsized movies that we have not been seeing at major studios. A Netflix movie doesn’t have the same pressure on it as a movie in theaters, and that’s good and bad. Obviously, these movies are being made by Netflix at a pretty decent budget, and a subscription is undeniably a lot cheaper than a movie ticket.
But the bad part is that if you go to the “new on Netflix” section, there are so many movies that you never hear about. Some of them might be great, but for whatever reason, they don’t enter the mainstream consciousness. If there’s a movie coming out in a theater, you’re going to at least hear about it.
You made “The Big Sick” outside the studio system, so you’d have creative control over its casting and story. Since then, you’ve been working a lot within the studio system. Is your sense that things are changing at that level?
There’s still a very long way to go, but I think it is changing. For instance, Emily [V. Gordon] and I wrote a movie and a really huge studio told us, “Hey, a woman of color should be the lead of this movie.” I don’t think we would have heard that five years ago from a major studio.
Now, I don’t know if we’re in an era right now where people are just talking about this a lot because Hollywood is under a microscope, or if it’s going to continue. But right now, you have someone like Constance Wu who can be the lead of a movie — she’s a bankable star because of “Crazy Rich Asians.” So even if it’s just this little window, the changes that happen will affect Hollywood going forward.
When you talk to people younger than you about the way they watch movies and consume pop culture, what do you find striking?
I’ve talked to multiple young people who have said that they don’t like movies! I was at a bar with a friend of mine who directs big movies, and while we were in line for the bathroom, he was saying that movie theaters were going to go away. He was like, “Kids don’t watch movies, they watch YouTube.” Which I thought was crazy.
So he goes, “Watch this.” There was a girl in front of us in line, and he said, “Hey, excuse me, what’s your favorite movie?” And she said, “I don’t watch movies.” Just randomly, he picked someone from the audience — and she was like 25, she wasn’t a child or anything. We were like, “Well, do any of your friends watch movies?” And she said, “Not really.”
I don’t want to sound like an old idiot, because I do watch those videos just to see what people are watching, and it’s so different from traditional movies and TV shows. I grew up watching “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins” and “Indiana Jones,” and if I had grown up watching YouTube, I don’t know if I would like movies.
I talk to younger people sometimes who can binge-watch an entire TV season in one sitting, but they’re resistant to watching a two-hour movie.
If you look at those people bingeing Netflix shows, they’re doing other things at the same time, or they’re on their phone. So it’s not that people think watching a movie is difficult, it’s that they think just watching that movie is difficult. I can’t tell you how much it would piss me off when people would live-tweet “The Big Sick.” And it happened all the time! It’s just how younger people engage with entertainment now.
In what other ways is social media going to shape the way movies are made?
Well, look at what happened with the “Sonic” movie. Because the internet didn’t like it, they’re redoing the Sonic design! People have always had an opinion on what they want, but they didn’t feel entitled to change that thing. It used to be, “This sucks,” and people would move on, and now it’s, “This sucks, change it.” I think it’s a weird, dangerous precedent.
What else do you think is changing?
When I watch Netflix movies, I find that they’re continually recapping things that have happened in previous scenes, and I think they very smartly understand that people will be doing a hundred other things and may have missed something. So the way movies are being made is changing.
Oh, and this is very cynical, but I think the standard of quality for people who watch stuff at home is not the same. If you go see “Avengers” in the movie theater, it better be great, but if you’re just watching stuff at home, it doesn’t matter so much if it’s great or not.
I don’t want to diss Netflix too much, because I do think they make amazing stuff and they’re giving shots to people who would not have been given shots 10 years ago, but I also think that Netflix would rather have five things that people kind of like than one thing people really love.
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