The Rebirth of An Era: How TV Has Surpassed Film

When two of the highest grossing film directors say that the entire Hollywood system is about to ‘implode’, we have a problem.

The news of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s speech at the University of Southern California has sent shock waves across the Internet and has terrified film students across the country. In a very quick summary, the two filmmakers explained that because of the 250 million dollar productions, ticket prices are gonna go up but that eventually most of the big budget films are going to fail causing a big meltdown in the industry.

Spielberg then mentioned that due to the trouble of making Lincoln, he was very close to releasing it on HBO instead of theaters. Steven Soderbergh also said recently that he would probably never work in cinema ever again because of the ways the people financing are meddling with his work. Soderbergh decided to make the excellent, Behind the Candelabra through HBO instead through theaters nationwide. This news of Spielberg and Soderbergh, saying that basically movies in movie theaters is slowly going away, while television is the future is really interesting.

In recent years, television has boomed into a new wave of content that has, in many ways, surpassed the film industry in quantity and quality.

Shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, give its audience an intelligent character pieces that emulate society and our roles in society. With Breaking Bad, the series is basically a 5 season long movie that give its audience the intelligent respect it deserves. Game of Thrones takes a big budget fantasy concept but tells it without any fear and with no demographic in mind, it just tries to tell a good story. There are countless other TV shows that treat its audience like adults, while the film industry constantly tries to dumb down its material for the wide audience. Hollywood don’t seem to be made with the intention of telling good stories, or portraying good characters, but gaining the widest margin people to watch the movie. TV is outplaying Film, because why would we go pay 15 bucks to watch what will probably be a shitty movie, when we could watch a good movie on TV for free. While you pay a TV package to watch cable, HBO, Showtime, etc. you still get more content than if you go to the movie theater and its most likely better.

With film directors starting to jump ship from the Hollywood industry to the TV industry, it looks like TV will overtake film as the dominant visual media market. Why go out to watch Fast and Furious in a theater when you can stay in the comfort of your own home and watch either an excellent TV show or a miniseries that has the production value of a Hollywood film, but it has the depth and quality of a good film.

The entire film industry does seem like its not making to many movies anymore and they are just risking it with very big budgeted summer movies. What’s gonna happen when they start failing? People can only like superheroes and sequels for so long, I mean I love watching the Marvel films but the way the industry is going, it’s gonna start getting expensive to watch a 2 hour piece of celluloid. Movies are not make enough money during there theatrical run and the Hollywood system may well implode, Spielberg and Lucas said.
The big question is, do we care that it implodes?

With TV being so good nowadays, it doesn’t really matter that going to the cinema will be unimportant because we can good films at home, either through TV or Netflix or etc. I mean we have the good content at out fingertips, so what’s the point. This kind of makes me sad, because while I do think that Television is surpassing Film, I enjoy the experience of going to a movie theater to watch a movie. I like the big screen, I saw some of my favorite films in theaters and its so much better to watch a good movie in theaters than a good movie at home. The cinema used to have a magical quality, but that’s gone. It’s a little disheartening that a medium that has brought me a lot of happiness is dying before my very eyes.

The worst part though, is that I want it to die.

I want to see good movies in theaters, I want the industry to come back to a time when there were mostly good movies out, but the only way this can happen now is through a rebirth. When big movies start to fail, the people holding the money will start to change to the growing audience. I enjoy the kind of content that is made on TV, but I want that kind of content on the silver screen. When people stop watching the big summer movies that are bad and demand good content in their movies, then movies will come back.

Until then, I’ll continue to watch some great pieces of visual art, on TV.