How Clever Editing Could Change How Films are Consumed
By: Rich James
Tags: Movies, Culture, Features, Film, Filmmaking

Chopping it up

The second major missed opportunity is one specifically for the growing number of film franchises, especially those which have more than a handful of titles.

Why not re-edit them into a television series?

For fear of being misunderstood, let me state clearly: I love films and don’t think under any circumstances they should be done away with. Yet as feature running times have increased and franchises expand to epic proportions, it’s unrealistic to expect new audiences to be able to set aside the time to watch them all in order to get up to speed.

For instance, it would take the better part of two days to watch every one of the 22 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019). Meanwhile, alongside the increase in running times and narrative arcs played out over multiple films, comes the rise in popularity of TV as a more easily digestible medium for telling complex and sprawling stories.

Sticking with the all-conquering MCU as our focus, there are of course multiple Marvel-licensed TV series available. But with films still claiming the biggest budgets, highest-profile actors, and best VFX, they have an uphill struggle trying to gain the same cultural purchase as their feature-length cousins. So, why not repackage the MCU films as television?

For the record, this idea isn’t mine. Someone has actually begun to make it a reality, by editing the MCU into an episodic TV shows. To me, this makes perfect sense. With shorter runtimes, it allows audiences to dip in and out, and consume things easier. The editing process would help iron out those plot holes for a smoother viewing experience and help breathe new life into the franchise’s older content.

A key hurdle to overcome with this is the concept of cultural content as ‘sacred’ artefacts. Whether it’s a novel, a film, or a TV series, creators and fans alike are reluctant to mess with the finished article, for fear of sullying its legacy. Yet there are countless precedents for work of this nature…

Music is constantly being remixed, covered, and re-sold in new forms. Literary fiction also has examples, such as in 2010 when author Jonathan Safran Foer (best known for his Guardian First Book Award-winning novel Everything is Illuminated) produced one of the more original works of literary fiction with Tree of Codes. To create the book, Foer physically modified Bruno Schulz’s 1934 short story collection The Street of Crocodiles, cutting out words and re-editing the prose to form another story entirely!

Editing film franchises into TV series is arguably less daring than either of these approaches as it retains the original subject matter, just in a different form. It’s been done with Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015), which was edited into a four-part mini-series for Netflix. In that instance, the approach may have been taken with a single film, but the principle stands. Moreover, it would provide the studio with yet another opportunity to cash in on their intellectual property without investing half as much as they would in greenlighting a new project. This is a particularly salient point when considering franchises in general, as studios are well-known to be risk-averse, hence their preference for ‘bankable’ sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and franchises with existing fanbases.

Of course, there will always be contracts and legalities to navigate, but on reflection, it’s something of a head-scratcher that industry giants like Disney haven’t made the relatively small mental leap themselves. This is especially true given the aforementioned fan project has already proven it possible, in spite of the apparent magnitude of undertaking it would involve.

Perhaps, in that case, it’s simply another example of a lack of imagination on the studio’s part: easier to keep rolling out the one-size-fits-all summer blockbusters to ensure maximum box office takings and Blu-ray box sets for existing content, than actually invest time in repurposing — and possibly improving? — their back catalogue. But simpler though it may be, it’s also another major missed opportunity for an industry which has struggled in recent years.

Main image | Credit: Rev.com