David Lynch says he’s bowing out of the movie business

David Lynch isn’t the kind of filmmaker who needs to prove his legacy. His films, including Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, are classics, but his TV work now seems to be his focus. Twin Peaks is making its way back to the small screen via a Showtime reboot, and Lynch’s legacy is secure for another generation.

It’s still a shock though, to hear Lynch share in a new interview that he’s done with movies.

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To be fair, Lynch hasn’t really been making movies these days. His last, Inland Empire, came out in 2006. This was before an era of peak TV, when actresses like muse Laura Dern were still unlikely to do TV work. It’s partly Lynch’s legacy on shows like Twin Peaks that brought the medium to its current state. And now that he’s back, it makes sense that he’d focus his efforts there.

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For The Sydney Morning Herald, Lynch shared his thoughts about the very different movie business:

"Things changed a lot. So many films were not doing well at the box office even though they might have been great films and the things that were doing well at the box office weren’t the things that I would want to do."

It’s true that Lynch was probably never going to be kind of director to pick up, say, a superhero franchise. But it’s still hard for his film fans to hear that one of the medium’s auteurs is, at least for now, ceasing action for now.