Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh talks like a filmmaker who’s spent enough time staring at balance sheets to stop romanticizing “the movies” as a singular, protected object. The line is bluntly pragmatic: piracy in China isn’t framed as a moral failing to be solved, but as a market condition to be engineered around. “Low-cost DVDs simultaneously” is less surrender than a strategic reframing of control. If you can’t stop the leak, change the container and timing so the leak matters less.

The subtext is about power: studios don’t actually distribute films, they manage scarcity. Windows, formats, release dates, pricing tiers-those are the tools that turn a piece of culture into a revenue ladder. Piracy short-circuits that ladder by collapsing time and access. Soderbergh’s suggestion is basically: meet the audience where they already are, with a product that acknowledges reality instead of punishing it.

The predictive kicker, “in five years, everything will,” carries a familiar Soderbergh tension between artistry and inevitability. He isn’t cheering the end of theatrical primacy; he’s diagnosing the technological pressure that will make “all formats” normal. The thought sits in the late-2000s/early-2010s anxiety zone, when DVDs were still meaningful, streaming was accelerating, and Hollywood was both seduced by China’s box office and terrified of losing control there.

It works because it refuses nostalgia. He treats distribution as design: if the medium is shifting, your job isn’t to defend old rituals, it’s to build new ones before someone else does.