Cutting a Movie into a TV Show Doesn’t Make It Better — or Make It Television
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The post Cutting a Movie into a TV Show Doesn’t Make It Better — or Make It Television appeared first on Consequence.
If there’s one phrase that has defined the conversation around TV’s evolution over the past 10 years, it’s this one: “It’s not a TV show, it’s a [BLANK]-hour movie.” It’s a line that’s been trotted out far too many times since the beginning of the 21st century — a line spoken most often by television creators who still see the label of television as a stigma.
This is why the new emerging trend we’re seeing in 2023 is at least the Alanis sort of ironic — the transformation of a previously existing movie into a limited series. Just this month, we’ve got two notable examples: AMC premiered a re-edit of this year’s Blackberry, stretching the invention of the communication device into a three-episode odyssey, while Baz Luhrmann re-edited his 2008 epic romance Australia into the six-episode Faraway Downs, streaming now on Hulu.
Both are very different projects created for different reasons. In the case of Blackberry, the true-life tale had been developed initially as a series, before the creative team decided to produce both versions this year, using the same footage. Faraway Downs, meanwhile, came about after Luhrmann began revisiting his Australia footage, while on a break from making 2022’s Elvis following Tom Hanks’ COVID diagnosis.
Yet both are reflections of the ongoing blurring between film and television, a dilemma of the streaming age that gets more complicated with each new example. With the unlimited real estate that broadband offers, a show is no longer beholden to strict episode runtimes, while movies can stretch on well past the point of any human bladder’s capacity. Coming soon to Apple TV+: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, all four hours of it. However, these re-edits feel predicated by the premise that because a story is longer, it by default will be better. And that is so rarely the case.
Examples of this trend don’t begin in 2023, but stretch back far longer: One under-the-radar “extended edition” released episodically was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight — oddly, the most contained of Tarantino’s projects became the one targeted for a four-episode series, which first premiered on Netflix in 2019.
Not to mention Zack Snyder’s Justice League. While the famed #SnyderCut was presented as one single part, the film does feature title cards breaking it up into parts, meaning it’s possible to watch it as an episodic experience. And those chapter breaks are actually pretty effective, too, in terms of splitting up the narrative in consumable chunks; ranging from 28 to 43 minutes, at the very least they’re honestly more consistent in length than a lot of Disney+ series.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (HBO Max)
Zack Snyder did actually consider splitting Justice League up into a four-episode season, for what it’s worth, and only declined to do so, as he told Deadline in 2021, out of concern about the “legal precedent” he might have created:
“Frankly, I think that there was some legal rumbling about the dividing up of a movie into four parts, and does it become a TV show, and does it void all the contracts. And I was like, look, guys, I don’t want to become…this sounds like we’re going to get in the weeds on this, and it’s a disaster, so let’s just not make legal precedent out of this movie, and I’ll just stick to my four-hour opus.”
Now that the matter of the contracts appears to be a less daunting question, it seems likely that more experiments of this kind might occur down the line — especially as the impact of this year’s strikes continues to be felt across the industry. Is that good news or bad news? None of these new versions have felt truly essential, with the exception of (depending on your level of fandom) the aforementioned Justice League. Yet all of them do prove at least intriguing, if only as examples of how little the importance of the “medium” can become.
The relative success of a film-to-television transition, creatively, can often be found in how the episodes begin and end: Does each installment conclude in a compelling fashion, with enough momentum generated to keep the viewer interested in hitting play on the next? If the core definition of a television show is its episodic nature, after all, then this should be the most relevant factor.
Hateful Eight, for example, has only one episode that ends with a strong hook — that’d be Episode 3, which concludes with a shootout that also drops the surprise reveal of another player, whose presence gets explained by the following episode’s opening flashback. Meanwhile, perhaps in part because the narrative isn’t shockingly different from film to TV, Blackberry’s three episodes feel less like distinct installments and more like one complete whole; the project ultimately can’t escape its filmic roots.
Faraway Downs does a decent job with aligning its narrative to an episode framework, though it helps that the story — an epic set across many years — does already have a chapter-like feel to it. And the Faraway Downs edit does solve at least one criticism I had of Australia — specifically that its central romance always felt rushed during the original edit, meaning that the climatic love scene never really felt earned. However, it also features a new ending, utilizing a cut scene Luhrmann had forgotten about to add extra tragedy to the story. (Reader, I hated it, though perhaps that’s my love of a happy ending speaking out.)
Still, what Faraway Downs highlights is that even with the addition of a new ending, a re-edit won’t solve all of a film’s problems: Luhrmann shot no new footage for the project, and maybe that’s why the opening sequences, which bring an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) to the titular land, are just as jumbled and chaotic as they were in the theatrical version. Blackberry might be just as compelling in series form as it was as a film, but the wigs still look very wig-like.
New endings aside, re-editing what already exists can only change a project so much, and so far, the film-to-TV transition seems to have primarily led to the creation of longer versions of the original films, but with a theme song every 30 minutes. Though that may change, as more creators dabble in this area — creators who aren’t ashamed to be making television, and using television’s defining qualities to their advantage.
Cutting a Movie into a TV Show Doesn’t Make It Better — or Make It Television
Liz Shannon Miller
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