We can all pretty much agree, now we’re over the half-way point, that this year has been one of the worst in living memory for movies, both creatively and financially. The blockbusters have mostly stunk, and have with only a few exceptions (“Captain America: Civil War” being the most notable) financially underperformed to a significant degree. The handful of decent mid-budget studio movies, like the well-loved “The Nice Guys,” also disappointed, and the indie scene has also seen a dearth of quality films, with only a few like “The Witch,” “Love & Friendship” and “The Lobster” managing to stand out. Only animated films have managed to both get good reviews and make money, it seems.
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Plenty of reasons have been posited for this, from the death of cinema to, uh, people being distracted by the run-up to the election. But one of the most commonly suggested reasons is that with competition from TV so fierce now, people would rather stay at home and watch something of increasingly better quality than you’d find in a multiplex, rather than venture out to an underwhelming retread like “Independence Day: Resurgence” or “Now You See Me 2.”
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The TV boom of recent years has been well documented, both here and elsewhere. The pop-culture conversation is increasingly driven by shows rather than films, from “Game Of Thrones” to “Making A Murderer.” And filmmakers and big-name writers now have no compunction about heading to an HBO, a Netflix or even a broadcast network, with everyone from Martin Scorsese to Steven Soderbergh winning rave reviews on the small screen of late. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that a sort of brain drain of talent from the movies, both established and new, is happening. Could reversing that brain drain, and luring some of the best TV showrunners back, be the answer to the movie studios’ current woes?
The separation of the cinematic church and the televisual state was, for a long time, rather a wide one. Many major mid-century filmmakers graduated from television gigs-for-hire — Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet — and the occasional writer like James L. Brooks or the late Garry Marshall would break out and become a big-screen auteur. But the movement was mostly one-way, and mostly aspirational, with TV seen as a lesser medium for mainstream figures.
The idea of the brand-name auteur TV creator/showrunner is a relatively recent invention, arriving with the early days of what’s generally known as the Second Golden Age Of TV in the late-1990s. And to their credit, the studios have had success in recent years in drawing some of its biggest names: J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon, who both started in features but made their names in TV, were hired for giant blockbusters and turned them into triumphs. Aaron Sorkin, who had a similar path, became a big-name movie writer. Between them, Edgar Wright, Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, and Phil Lord & Chris Miller, who all started in TV, reinvented the movie comedy.
There were failures, too: “The Sopranos” creator David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” was very good, but did no business, while “Mad Men” mastermind Matthew Weiner’s “Are You Here” went almost completely unseen, and with good reason. But even they don’t explain why, as more and more great TV has landed, the movie studios don’t seem to have made much effort to seek out the next Abrams, Whedon, Apatow or Lord & Miller.
In part, it’s because they’ve been busy. Many showrunners and creators are still deeply involved with shows and don’t have time to go off and direct a movie (“Game Of Thrones” leaders David Benioff and D.B. Weiss won’t be available for a couple of years yet), while others have only just wrapped up. But it’s still notable that an up-and-comer like “Fargo” honcho Noah Hawley’s new projects are predominantly TV, not film, with new FX show “Legion” and a “Cat’s Cradle” adaptation for the same network joining future “Fargo” seasons. The reality is that despite the allure of the big screen (which most of them will have grown up wanting to go into), television is both financially and creatively much more appealing right now.
Advances in digital photography and effects, and shorter episode orders (virtually no acclaimed TV series now does the 22 episodes that was standard only a few years ago) mean that TV has become more cinematic, with shows like “The Knick” or “Mr. Robot” being as well-directed as anything on the big-screen. But while this side of things is relatively new for television, it remains, as it always has been, a writer’s medium.