Netflix Wants Action Scenes to Start Movies

In bonus footage from “A TGB & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” the two actors mentioned how studios have begun catering to people who’re utilizing their telephones while watching films or TV reveals.

“In this day of shorter attention spans and vertical 12-second spots, are we losing the patience for Act 1?” McConaughey said. “Because it’s the first thing that gets cut. It’s the first thing a studio wants to get rid of. I’m seeing Act 2, more and more, start on freakin’ page 12 [of a script]. I’m seeing 10-part series where — bam! — Act 1’s over 32 minutes into the opening episode, and you’re off on the conflict right away. It feels abbreviated to me.”

Chalamet responded, “I saw an article about a Netflix production guideline — not for all movies, I don’t want to speak disparagingly, but — where they want their biggest action set pieces up front. The logic used to be: Save your big action set piece for the end of a movie. You save the fireworks for the end. But now they want something up front.”

Chalamet was referencing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s current interview with Joe Rogan about their Netflix film “The Rip,” the place Damon revealed the streamer’s strategy for making action films. “The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon said. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

But Chalamet hasn’t misplaced hope. “I also think there’s sort of a reverse thing going on where people are desiring things that are more patient and that pull you in,” he said. “I just saw another article that says Gen Z is a bigger moviegoing audience than millennials. ‘Frankenstein’ was a hugely popular movie this year; I didn’t think that pacing was extraordinarily fast, but it pulled people in.”

“Some people want to be entertained quickly,” Chalamet continued. “I’m really right in the middle, because I admire people [saying], ‘Hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive. We gotta keep this genre alive.’ And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it — like “Barbie,” like “Oppenheimer” — they’re going to go see it and go out of their approach to be loud and proud about it.”

With amusing, he concluded: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore’ — all respect to the ballet and opera people out there.”

Watch the prolonged version of “A TGB & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” on Variety‘s YouTube channel or on the TGB app.