David Chase ‘extremely angry’ over ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ HBO Max release: ‘I think it’s awful’

David Chase revolutionized television by creating "The Sopranos," which aired on HBO for six seasons from 1999 to 2007.

Chase had no intention of revisiting his HBO successes with "The Many Saints of Newark," the "Sopranos" prequel film directed by Alan Taylor that will simultaneously release in theaters and to HBO Max on Oct. 1.

"I don’t think, frankly that I would've taken the job if I knew it was going to be a day-and-date release," Chase, 76, told Deadline in this wide-ranging new interview. "I think it's awful."

When asked how it felt when the decision was made to give "Many Saints" a day-and-date release, the seven-time Emmy winner didn't hold back.

"Extremely angry, and I still am. I mean, I don't know how much you go into this, you know, like …  okay. If I was … one of those guys, if one of those executives was sitting here and I was to start pissing and moaning about it, they'd say, you know, there's 17 other movies that have the same problem. What could we do? Covid! Well, I know, but those 16 other movies didn’t start out as a television show. They don’t have to shed that television image before you get people to the theater. But we do. And that’s where we’re at. People should go see it in a theater. It was designed to be a movie. It was … it’s beautiful as a movie. I never thought that it would be back on HBO. Never."

"The Many Saints of Newark" is set against the Newark race riots and centers around Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the mobster father of Christopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperioli in "The Sopranos," as he mentors a young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini, the son of the late James Gandolfini, epically portrayed Tony Soprano in the series).

James Gandolfini earned six Primetime Emmy nominations for his iconic work on The Sopranos, winning three of them, and sadly passed away in June 2013 from a heart attack. He was 51 years old. Michael, just 13 at the time of James' death, had never watched any of his father's "Sopranos" episodes until "Many Saints" came around.

"I just didn’t have any doubts," Chase said of casting Michael. "I don’t know why. We saw a bunch of other kids, and it wasn’t going anywhere. And then I thought of him … I mean, I remembered him as a 13-year-old. On the day of his father’s funeral. I hadn’t seen him in five or six years, and then my wife Denise and I went out to lunch with him on a Saturday, and he was a grownup. He seemed to me to be very different from his father temperamentally.

"We were just having lunch, but once I thought about it, once the idea popped into my head, I said, we have to do this," he continued. "Do I think that if he really had been no good I would’ve gone ahead with it anyway? No, but I just had a…you know, The Sopranos was an interesting phenomenon. Things used to happen there, and I don’t mean to sound conceited when I say this. But for almost the entire run of the series, we couldn’t put a foot wrong."

Watch "The Many Saints of Newark" trailers below.