We Came Close To A Logan Lucky Spin-Off With Daniel Craig

Heist movies are the best movies. This is an irrefutable fact. Stories about a group of people coming together and devising a plan to steal money, jewels, art, or anything of value from a secure location give you everything you could want. They're about interpersonal relationships, people being good at their jobs, sticking it to the powerful, and they're always filled with delightful complications and twists. In terms of big screen entertainments, they truly are the ideal genre, and no one is better at making them than Steven Soderbergh.

Of course, the crowning jewel of his heist oeuvre is the "Ocean's" trilogy, a star-studded triptych of top-shelf Hollywood entertainment that I could watch at any time. I even rewatched "Ocean's Eleven" two days before I even knew I would be writing this. Those films don't make up the entirety of the heist section of his filmography, though. He came back from his short-lived retirement with the utterly delightful 2017 heist comedy "Logan Lucky," starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Hilary Swank, Riley Keough, and one Mr. Daniel Wroughton Craig.

Most of the world caught on to the former James Bond's comedic stylings with "Knives Out," but they could've been prepared for what was to come had they seen "Logan Lucky" two years earlier, in which he plays the Southern-fried safe cracker Joe Bang. Since he signed up to play 007, it's the first time Craig was able to fully let loose with a character, and you can see a decade of the repressed character actor inside him burst free into one of the most gloriously funny performances of the 2010s. Soderbergh knew he had lightning in a bottle with what Craig was doing and had plans for more Joe Bang. Unfortunately, sometimes the business becomes the more important part of the phrase "show business."

Soderbergh has a rather fraught relationship with the theatrical movie business. It began with his Liberace biopic "Behind the Candelabra," which he had to go to HBO to make. This is partly what steered him to moviemaking retirement and ultimately over to TV with "The Knick." Coming back to movies with "Logan Lucky," a movie with an audience-friendly premise and big stars, you'd hope it would do pretty well. It didn't, not even making back its relatively modest $29 million budget domestically. When it comes to trying to get a green light to return to that world, no amount of great reviews can help that. In a recent Reddit AMA Soderbergh took part in, he revealed that they, "Had a prequel all teed up about how Joe Bang got thrown in jail, but when the movie didn't perform well enough to justify another go, we dropped the idea." Soderbergh's next movie was the also underperforming "Unsane," and he's more or less turned his back on theatrical filmmaking ever since.

We're currently at a major turning point for streaming. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are both on strike partly due to that business. The streaming bubble looks like it's going to burst, but theatrical moviegoing isn't fully back to what it once was, even if the "Barbenheimer" weekend was a boon. 

Look, if Soderbergh starts finding it hard to make streaming movies and people won't go see his movies in theaters, this is not a cinematic landscape I want to exist in. He's one of our very best directors, constantly reinventing himself, and perfectly balances his broad and esoteric works. I want to see Steven Soderbergh movies back in theaters, so I'm imploring you to support them.

And I want to see that Joe Bang movie.