‘News Of The World’ Director Paul Greengrass Expects A Return To Cinemas In Six Months

Director Paul Greengrass has said he expects people to be back in cinemas in six months.

“I think we’ll be back in cinemas sooner than we think, in six months I think we’ll start to go back”, said the Brit filmmaker, who was speaking about his Tom Hanks drama News Of The World on the BBC’s Today Programme on Radio 4.

The Oscar-nominated director was asked whether he was frustrated the Universal Pictures movie would largely be seen on TV sets and laptops rather than on the big screen (Netflix acquired international rights last fall and the movie was fast-tracked to VOD in the U.S.) due to the pandemic.

“Inevitably, yes. We made it for the big screen. But the movie industry is facing a great crisis, obviously. Production has been interrupted and cinemas are mostly closed across the world. The choice is what do you do. We could have elected to delay the release a year, but I didn’t want to do that. I thought it was a film that is relevant to today. I think we’ll be back in cinemas sooner than we think, in six months I think we’ll start to go back.”

He added: “It’s not the creative experience I would ideally want or financial experience they [the financiers/studio] would ideally want but in a sense we’re saying something more important than that, that cinema will survive this dark time and hope for better days to come, and I do believe they will come.”

Greengrass said the film was partly inspired by “looking beyond division and bitterness” and how “storytelling, news and truth has a fundamental role to play”: “What has been undermined in America is objective truth. If you have many millions of people believing a fair election was stolen you have a problem.”

News Of The World charts the story of a Civil War veteran who agrees to deliver an abducted girl to family who live hundreds of miles away. The veteran gets by by reading the news to those who can’t read.

The historical drama was released stateside over Christmas and rolls out internationally in the first quarter of 2021.