Steven Spielberg predicted a “collapse” of the Hollywood film industry 10 years ago and warned of fluctuations in the price of cinema tickets as a result of blockbuster films.

Speaking at the University of Southern California Media Center inauguration with George Lucas in June 2013, the director envisioned a world in which the failure of six $250 million budget films could lead to dramatic variances in ticket prices.

Spielberg told USC students that price increases could mean that “you’ll have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man movie, but you’ll probably only have to pay $7 to see the Lincoln movie».

The director observed that some ideas from younger filmmakers are “too marginal for cinema”.

However, in 2015 Spielberg denied that he was talking about a “collapse” in the Hollywood film industry. “To clarify, I never predicted the collapse of the film industry“, he said during a press conference.

“I just predicted that with a string of blockbusters in a summer—those big superhero movies—there would come a time when two or three or four of them wouldn’t be successful. That’s really all I said. I didn’t say the movie industry would ever end because of them,” he noted, adding: “I just said that this particular superhero genre doesn’t have the foundation or longevity of the Western, which has been around since the beginning of cinema and only started to shrink in the decade of the 60’s”.