After being nominated for his ninth Academy Award for best director for his semi-autobiographical picture “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg has been named America’s favourite director.
Among 92 living directors surveyed (January 14-15, 2023) by Morning Consult, the 76-year-old director of “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” received the highest net favorability rating from U.S. audiences. (The net favorability rating is the proportion of respondents who hold a favourable view of each director minus the ratio who have an unfavourable view.)
Spielberg finished with a score of 71, 9 percentage points more than the runner-up, Clint Eastwood, whose long experience as an actor certainly contributed to his popularity as a filmmaker. Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, and Ron Howard rounded out the top five.
This year’s other three nominees for the Academy Award for Best Director were also included in the survey: Martin McDonagh, director of “The Banshees of Inisherin” (ranked 59th out of 92), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, co-directors of “Everything, Everywhere, Everywhen” (ranked 77th), and Todd Field, director of “Tár” (ranked 85th).
Spielberg has already won two Oscars for best director, one for “Schindler’s List” in 1993 and another for “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998. The director’s most personal film to date, “The Fabelmans”, is a coming-of-age story about how he fell in love with filmmaking.
Spielberg has already won the hearts of Americans, regardless of whether he wins his third award on March 12.
What’s next for Hollywood’s most popular filmmakers?
The list of the best directors was dominated by senior filmmakers like Spielberg and others, particularly among older generations and die-hard moviegoers. Although “The Fabelmans” has not performed well at the box office, the film has been acclaimed by critics, and the attention it will receive throughout the awards season should attract more viewers. Following Spielberg’s victory at the Golden Globes earlier this month, the film climbed to No. 4 on the video-on-demand charts.
Christopher Nolan, who ranked 18th among adults and 14th among enthusiastic moviegoers, will next appear in July with “Oppenheimer,” a high-budget biopic about the titular theoretical physicist who was important in the development of the atomic bomb. Later this year, Scorsese’s crime drama “Killers of the Flower Moon” debuts on Apple TV+.
Francis Ford Coppola, the renowned director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” who ranked in the top 10 among both groups, is currently producing his first picture in more than a decade: “Megalopolis,” a sci-fi epic apparently hampered by production issues. (He has refuted those assertions.) He is already well-established as one of America’s favourites, which is fortunate for Coppola.
