What are Movies Anyway?

With all the movies that have come out in the past few years based on old TV shows ("The Beverly Hillbillies", "Lost in Space", "The Brady Bunch Movie", "Get Smart"), toys and games ("Transformers", "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"), and comic book characters ("Iron Man", "Superman", etc.), and all the movies that have come out as series ("Lord of the Rings", "Pink Panther", "Harry Potter", etc.), it has often been difficult to get the clear distinction that we are watching movies. The addition factors of "made for TV movies" and before movie television type advertising at many theatre chains have blurred the distinction even more.

With smaller attendance in the theatres and sky rocketing costs (of the movies themselves, and the cost of attending one), this form has been threatened. In fact on many movies, the theatre run is a loss leader with DVD sales being the goal, along with the sales of soundtrack albums and assorted merchandise.

For those of us who are movie makers and those who love the movies, here is a quick definition of what a movie is" A movie - a feature film, that is - is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end that can last as little as an hour and has been known to last as long as 4 hours, but typically runs in length between 90 minutes and two hours. There is another factor to a movie which distinquishes it from a TV show episode: the main character changes. Typically on a TV show, things happen but the characters always return to the way they were when the show started. In a movie, however, the character is not the same as when they began. They either learn something becoming stronger characters at the end and triumphing over the antagonist or the don't change and experience tragedy when the story ends. TV just doesn't to this. TV represents a static situation, movies represent growth and change.

There is something else that makes a movie different from television, even "made for TV" movies: Movies have an audience. Not an audience of people sitting in separate rooms watching separate televisions but an audience made up of a group of people. It is a community experience. The experience is different from television and can most keenly be felt when you are in a packed auditorium watching a good comedy. There is nothing that can replace the magnified feelings you get from a movie when you are in a full auditorium. The poor way the business has been run very much threatens this experience and drives people into home theatres. Although home theatres can replicate much of the experience of being in an actual movie theatre in projection and in sound, it cannot satisfactorily replace the audience experience because the numbers are simply not there. The large theatre chains have successfully driven away the audience numbers that it takes to have this experience out of the home except for the big tent pole franchises that people find worth paying high ticket prices for.

Will movies - the kind you go out to see - die? It's hard to say. Most likely it would survive in pockets of experience, if the current leaders of the movie studio establishment and theatre chains manage to kill it. It is just that there is nothing really to replace the experience you get in a full audience and someone is likely to find a way to make it continue. As for filmmakers themselves, there will always be a market for long form self contained stories no matter where they are seen - movie theatres, DVD, the Internet, or TV (cable or broadcast).