A week away from slinging to screens as the star of Madame Web, Dakota Johnson is weaving a worrying portrait of the film industry outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In a new conversation with L'Officiel, Johnson was asked about her development of "really disparate projects" with her production company TeaTime, leading the actress share how "really fucking bleak" it is that executives appear less and less willing to take chances on original stories and smaller budgets.
"We made a movie called Daddio that was sold at Telluride to Sony Classics, which was amazing, but it took a lot of fighting to get that made," Johnson shared. "People are just so afraid, and I'm like, why? What's going to happen if you do something brave? It just feels like nobody knows what to do, and everyone's afraid. That's what it feels like. Everyone who makes decisions is afraid. They want to do the safe thing, and the safe thing is really boring."
Johnson expressed how she's "discovering that it's really fucking bleak in this industry," expressing, "It is majorly disheartening. The people who run streaming platforms don’t trust creative people or artists to know what's going to work, and that is just going to make us implode. It's really heartbreaking. It's just fucking so hard. It's so hard to get anything made. All of the stuff I'm interested in making is really different, and it's unique and it's very forward in whatever it is."
That isn't stopping Johnson from trying, of course. She shared that her next project with TeaTime would begin production "at the top of [2024]," revealing, "It's a tricky plot to outline, so I won't even try, but it's about a woman handling grief and how she does it in a specific way."
Johnson has also heard all your "nepo baby" comments (discourse she finds "incredibly annoying and boring," as she shared on the Today Show Wednesday). But if this is how the children of famous actors are finding the film industry, what hope do less-connected filmmakers have when it comes to breaking into Hollywood?
It was also announced today that Johnson is in talks to lead Celine Song's Materialists, a follow-up to the director's Past Lives.
Madame Web arrives in theatres February 14.