Where are all the movies for grown-ups? It’s a common complaint levelled at the Big Five distributors who prize family-friendly, effects-driven action tentpoles over the kind of adult dramas and grounded thrillers that once dominated the box office.
The simple answer is they’re on your TV. But they’re not movies any more, they’re six-to-10-hour miniseries, and it’s high time that changed. Too often I roll credits on a self-contained season of TV and find myself wondering if what I’ve just spent weeks watching episodically would have been better as a tightly constructed, handsomely produced piece of cinema.
Otherwise excellent shows such as Black Bird, Under the Banner Of Heaven, Pam & Tommy, The Shining Girls and The Resort all suffer from a common problem: they feel padded at half a dozen hours or more. Given the movie-calibre talent typically involved, the question becomes why aren’t we seeing these stories play out on the big screen?
The answer, again, is simple: studios don’t think they can turn a profit at the cinema any more. So shows like these are financed by content-hungry streaming services instead, produced on a small-screen budget and timeframe with one expectation: keep as many people as possible subscribed to their service for as long as possible.
It’s even happening in the blockbuster space. The two biggest problems with this summer’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series were its cheap-looking stagecraft effects and the fact it was plainly two hours’ worth of story stretched into six – both easily solved had Lucasfilm stuck to its blasters and produced it for the cinema.
The benefits of the streaming era are obvious – relatively inexpensive access to more stories than ever, told by more diverse voices than ever. But the drawbacks are equally clear – certain types of stories can now only be told on TV, which is resulting in cinema becoming a playground for spectacle alone. The sad thing is, the stories that could restore a healthy, varied theatrical slate already exist, they’re just being made for the wrong medium. Or is it just me?
