Why Do We Even Bother Making Movies?

A stupid question that gets less stupid when you think about it

Photo courtesy of Jake Hills.

Movies haven’t really recovered from Covid. In 2019, the film industry made $181 million during the Thanksgiving period; this year, it was $95 million. A senior analyst at Comscore dubbed the movie market “confounding” and called the dismal Thanksgiving returns “an attention getter for an industry that’s still reeling”. 41 percent of consumers say they “rarely” go see movies; 18 percent say they never go at all. Just about the only movie that’s doing well right now is Black Panther: Wakanda Literally Forever Because We Will Keep Cranking These Out Until You Stop Going To See Them.

Everyone knows basically why this is happening: streaming. Why put on pants (already a non-starter as far as I’m concerned) and go out in public and interact with — shudder — human beings when you can watch a movie from home? Covid just accelerated a trend that had already started, and nobody in entertainment is unaware of the shift. But I think what’s happening is an even more profound change than most people realize. I think it’s time to ask “What is a movie and why do we even bother making them?”

What is a movie? Well, it’s a picture that moves — CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!?!?! 126 years after a bunch of hayseeds ran from a moving picture of a train, we’re still promoting the fact that — get this, friend! — there’s motion in this picture (plus it’s a talkie!). Movies quickly evolved to be about 90-120 minutes long, which happened due to practical reasons. Theatres wanted to pack many showings into a night; anything over two hours created scheduling problems. Long movies needed a reel change/intermission, and hence more scheduling headaches. Also, two hours is about the maximum amount of time you can sit in a crowded space without losing your mind; we’ve all gotten off a five-hour flight with a mental list of who on the flight we would murder and how. A two hour limit on crowds makes sense.

The two hour timeframe has proven remarkably durable.¹ So…fine, right? We’ve been using the two-hours-unless-you’re-Kevin-Costner rule for a century, there must be something to it, nothing to see here. But I’ve got issues with the movie format. From my perspective as a writer, the two hour timeframe causes big problems.

In my experience, screenwriting is about two-thirds problem solving. Writers drone on about world and themes and the three act structure and goddamned social commentary — we must give the world the gift of our social commentary! — but I spend most of my time thinking “how do I let people know what the fuck is happening without it sounding stupid?” That is: There’s plot that needs to be conveyed — how do I get that information out in a way that isn’t ham-fisted? How do I avoid dialogue like: “Welp, only one hour ‘till the big dance contest! If me and my sass-talking monkey Mr. Bonkers win, then we’ll have enough money to save the orphanage!” Conveying such information in a graceful way is the art of the master scribe.

The more constraints on a writer, the more difficult her task becomes. Before I worked in TV, I didn’t realize the extent to which practical considerations limit creativity. A writer’s main constraint is money; every element of production costs more money than God will see in ten lifetimes. A script that burns through money like rap mogul in a strip club won’t get made. And there are other constraints — if you don’t give an actor enough lines, he might get pissy. If a character says “let’s go to Walmart”, fear of a lawsuit might compel the network to make you change it to “let’s go to an unspecified retail outlet that specializes in wholesale pricing”. If a character speaks the line “hey now, you’re an all-star”, you have to throw substantial money to Smashmouth. These are just a few of the six jillion considerations that a writer has to manage. Entertainment is the art of the possible, and good writer stays within the limits imposed on them, as reflected in my screenplay: Chris Kattan Sits Motionless in an Unremarkable Room.

Time constraints are simply one additional — and major — limitation. Movie timeframes tend to be extremely compact; screenwriting classes tell you that you should introduce the main character, show their world, communicate their goals, introduce their primary relationships, and have an event that throws their world into chaos in the movie’s first ten minutes. That’s a lot to pack in, and it favors trite stories and simple characters. If you have an idea for a character who’s a Mennonite flute prodigy whose autism is triggered by memories from their time in Vietnam, well…good luck getting that across in ten minutes.

On the other hand, a writer might have too few ideas. And at that point, they’ll start churning out the primary structural element of every Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie: filler. Did you ever wonder why Manos: The Hands of Fate has extensive girl-fight scenes that serve no narrative purpose? The answer is because a movie is not allowed to be just 40 minutes long. The two hour requirement is a double-ended dildo that can screw you in either direction; no matter how much or how little story you have, your screenplay just has to be roughly two hours. End of story.

In the ‘50s, some people thought that TV would replace movies. That didn’t happen, largely because the TV format introduced constraints that made the content different from movies. Shows had to be 30 or 60 minutes for scheduling reasons. There were advertisers, so you had to be careful not to offend the good people at Tasty Tot Cigarettes. You couldn’t swear. There were act breaks — before I wrote for a network show, I didn’t think about act breaks, but three times an episode, you have to come up with a mini-cliffhanger compelling enough to get people to sit through a commercial. And, of course — because networks had to churn out 24 hours of programming a day — TV budgets were a far cry from movie budgets. Probably nothing illustrates the gap between TV and movie budgets better than comparing Star Wars to its knock-off TV show: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If you’re not familiar with the latter, behold:

For decades, TV and movies each had their lane. TV was an ad-based model that delivered quantity. Movies were a fee-based model focused on quality, swearing, and boobs, not necessarily in that order. The entertainment universe was balanced.

But it’s become unbalanced because of streaming. The boundary between TV and movies is increasingly arbitrary. Streaming shows don’t have ads, and people are making the switch to watching movies at home. There’s big-time production money behind shows like Game of Thrones: Dragon Babies and The Lord of the Elves: Power of the Rings of Narnia. As formats change, the rules are changing, too: Pay cable and streaming shows aren’t always exactly 30 or 60 minutes long. On many network TV shows (like the one I write for), you can swear — they just bleep it. Most sitcoms these days are “single-camera”, which means that they’re filmed like movies. The 24-episode sitcom season and the 25-person writers room are extinct. Things are changing.

But in my opinion, they aren’t changing fast enough. Shows are still pitched as 30 or 60 minutes — why can't a show be, say, 41 minutes, except for the episodes that are 35 or 44? A streaming season is almost always conceived of as exactly ten episodes — why? Limited series — long the mule of the entertainment world because they're neither one thing nor the other — are still sneered at even though some of the best things are limited series. Everyone in entertainment is aware of the change that's happening but too few have extrapolated what that change will ultimately mean.

I think it will mean this: The line between TV and movies will almost entirely fade away. There won't be TV and movies anymore — there will just be stuff. Some stuff will be stand-alone, two hour stories, as movies have always been. And some stories will be a hundred hours divided into 22 minute chunks, like Friends. There's nothing wrong with these formats. But other formats are now possible. You can have a 12-hour story divided into three-hour chunks, or a story that's 40 hours released 80 minutes at a time. When you pitch to a network, you should be able to pitch the story you want to write instead of adjusting your story to fit one of the pre-approved time-frames. These things are possible now; they're already starting to happen. Practical considerations about how much people will watch in one sitting and how much money studios will throw at a single idea will always be at play, but constraints imposed by movie theatres and broadcast schedules will not.

I find this freeing. Hopefully, I won’t spend much more of my career trying to cram ten pounds of plot into a five pound bag, or wondering how many unmotivated cat fights between nightgown-clad women I need to add to hit my page count. In the future, my only limitations will be audience preferences, production costs, and — as always — my complete lack of talent.

I don't think that movies will go extinct. Some people enjoy going to the theatre, and a lot of places don't have good WiFi. So, there will still be a place for high-budget, two-hour stories suitable for theatres. We'll probably still call them “movies” — the word is already anachronistic, so why change? But what we currently think of as movies will, in reality, just be one type of stuff out of many.

1. You might be thinking: “Haven’t movies gotten longer recently?” And, yes, they have! But only a bit, and only recently. There’s a slight uptick at the end of the Towards Data Science graph I linked to, and analysis from Who To Watch finds that the average top-ten movie was nine minutes longer in 2021 than in 2011 (though, FWIW, I prefer the Towards Data Science analysis, because limiting your data set to top-ten movies creates a small sample comprised entirely of blockbusters).

So, yes, a bit longer recently, after having stayed remarkably steady for about 70 years. And the uptick is almost certainly because of streaming; theatre schedules matter a lot less these days. Things are changing, though I wouldn’t call it a sea change just yet.