Right now television is replacing film as the predominant medium for storytelling. There is so much variety, creativity and talent on television without the requirement that content must make hundreds of millions of dollars to be deemed successful. Networks measure success, and their audiences, by a variety of standards. Television has also overcome the restriction of content needing to fit into 30 or 60 minute time windows because stories can be told in many-episode segments.
A story on television can be as short as a few minutes and as long 50 or more hours. Many of us consume television now they way we have often consumed movies – on demand and at home. But with big-budget movies, we tend to consume them the way we have traditionally consumed television – as appointment viewing.
I realized as I was watching Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol that film is likewise replacing television. As the number of options on TV expands, its familiarity disappears. 125 million people watched the M.A.S.H. finale. 50 million watched the final Johnny Carson Tonight Show. TV shows don’t draw ratings in those numbers anymore. The only media objects that traverse our culture to that degree are movies.
Hollywood studios now focus their production primarily on franchises – movies with built-in audiences, or purely “artful” movies that they hope will win awards and increase their credibility and clout. A lot of people decry this as a bad thing – I know I was disappointed when I went to see Star Wars Episode VII last week and saw 6 trailers for franchise blockbusters all featuring the end of the world in some capacity. But maybe familiar cultural artifacts are necessary in our society – we need something that everyone is interested in to be able to relate to one another as a people.
Maybe if movies were as creative and diverse in content as they were 20 years ago our society would be flooded with so much art we wouldn’t be able to communicate as a people, we’d just hang out in coffee shops and stare at each other, or talk in grunts. Maybe human evolution is tied to inane, mass-appealing content. Maybe we should stone Terrence Malick, Lars Von Trier, and all Indie Pop singers.
Anyway, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol isn’t that good, but who cares? Tom Cruise does a crazy-ass stunt, Simon Pegg says some funny things, and there are a bunch of explosions.
Next: Rock of Ages
Every Tom Cruise Movie 