TV (Finally) Killed Movies

The great battle between TV and movies has finally been won and not by the side that was expected. While during the 1950’s people feared that the advent of television and its increasing popularity would give way to the death of the movie theater, it took nearly sixty more years for it to finally begin to put the nails in the movies’ coffin.
Around 1950, television became a popular form of media in the United States. People were clambering around the television to watch programs each night, all the while movie studios became worried that their viewership would drop because of this new form of presentation. What followed were a number of gimmicks in hopes of attracting people away from their TV sets- things like wide screen movies, which first started popping up around 1953 with The Robe. What followed were other gimmicks like 3-D, Smell-O-Vision, etc. However, none of these gimmicks were really able to substitute for good storytelling.
Movies were lucky enough to have a relatively good period between 1965-1981, when there were interesting, smart, and challenging movies being made on all fronts, whether they were small art-house pieces about relationships or big Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars and Jaws. These movies were actually spurred on by the failure of those epic movies, those extremely expensive blockbusters of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.
However, since then, the movies have lost their souls. Rather than worrying about the quality of the product, the story being told, or the message within the movie, the movies have become so expensive that there is no room for exploration or taking chances. The reason for this failure of creating intellectually vigorous movies rests in two camps, as I see it. First, starting in the early 1980’s studio heads began to see that they could control the product that was being produced. Stronger studio heads began to dictate the product and took away the creative freedom many directors had enjoyed during the 1970’s, part of this had to do with the box-office success of the movies of the late 1970’s, movies like Star Wars and Jaws had made so much money for the studios that the heads decided their best bet would be to find more big movies like this that could make a huge amount of money into.
During the late 1980s’ and early 1990’s as movies like this became increasingly prominent, movies like Die Hard and Predator and other such action movies became increasingly lucrative for the studios. However, the star power of the actors in these movies also increased their power, as actors began to receive eight, ten, and eventually twenty million dollars for each movie they did. This only served to create increasingly bloated budgets as movies began to regularly cost one hundred million dollars. These movies cost so much money that there is no room for error, no room for any semblance of chance.
So how has TV killed movies? First, one should look at the growth of popularity of DVDs and other such media sources. DVD’s, ITunes, downloadable content, have all increased the access to various sorts of media that people have. You couple that with the large number of television channels, providing increasing number of options and the high saturation of cable in the United States, it leads to increased revenue opportunities. Combine the multiple ways in which people can make money from this content with the either pay-television or commercials found on television programs, it creates both an increasing stream of revenue for television shows and increases the potential budget and production values of these television shows.
A television show can run anywhere from 20 minutes an episode to 60 minutes, while a season can run anywhere from 10 to 22 episodes a season. On the low-end, this gives the writers, directors, and actors nearly two hundred minutes in which to create and explore stories and characters. For a pay television, hour-long, thirteen episode series they will have thirteen hours, or 780 minutes. Most movies run anywhere from 80-120 minutes, on the high end they will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 minutes. This space that TV shows are afforded both allows for increased character development but also is divided up in such away that it makes it easier for our ADD generation to swallow. An episode of even an hour is much easier for someone to watch than two or three hours of a movie.
By its having a broader framework within which to work, and because of its increasing profitability, television shows have begun to attract grade A talent and have grown by leaps and bounds when it comes to production value. Martin Scorsese has his first television show coming out this fall, Steven Spielberg has produced two mini-series, actors like Alec Baldwin, Glenn Close, and many others have found themselves on TV series. What was formerly the refuge of lesser actors has become the place in which much of visual media’s talent has fled. The canvas upon which to paint stories that in some cases have become novel-esque is almost astounding when one looks at a series or even a series of television as a whole.
As I stated previously, the quality of television has far exceeded the quality of 99.9% of the movies that are produced each year. One need only to look at The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Southpark, or mini-series like John Adams, Band of Brothers, or The Company to see how far the quality of television has come to exceed that which is on the silver screen.
Movies have become victims of their own success. The large amount of money that they are able to make also is their great weakness, making their need for assured success turn them into bland, banal, and uninteresting special-effects fests. Television, on the other hand, has become the place in which one can watch characters grow and change, we can come to know these characters better than we know ourselves, and watch as stories expand upon themselves and become something even better.
Television has finally succeeded in killing movies. It has done exactly what movie studios feared would happen in the 1950’s, yet, they were not alone in doing it. Movies had equal part in choking themselves, by using the very techniques they hoped would separate them from television. As I sit back and watch as movies become increasingly insipid, I can only hope that this slow death will lead to a rebirth similar to that of the late 1960’s- but I would not hold my breath waiting for it.