Interesting read I just lifted from
Goatpostman on reddit in a topic on why is television so good now, and movies so bad:
(Warning wall of text)
We're in the blockbuster era for movies. In the 70s, the studios liked to make ten $10m movies -- an introspective drama, a thriller, a teen comedy, a grownup comedy, a horror movie, something artsy, something raunchy, something for older women, something for teenage boys -- and try to cover all the bases that way, and hope that they'd end up with a surprise hit or two. Then they released them roadshow-style -- New York today, Texas in six months, London today, Paris sometime next year. Jaws and Star Wars changed all that, and the method switched to investing very heavily in one or two really high-budget movies -- one $100m film, rather than ten $10m ones -- and launching an intensive global marketing campaign for the simultaneous worldwide release. That kind of marketing isn't really effective for the old style of moviemaking.
And it works, it's very profitable and successful. Production values are much higher and there's a bigger atmosphere of hype. But it makes you very conservative with what movies you pick. When your studio was producing 50 movies a year, you could afford to gamble a little, take a chance on something that sounds just crazy enough to work. When you're only producing 5 a year due to the enormous expense, well, you're going to pick your movies a lot more carefully, and you're going to go with something reliable and proven. This is why sequels really exploded in the 80s. Think of the most popular movies of the 60s, how many of them had sequels? Now try to find a popular movie from the 80s that didn't get at least one. The trend dipped a little in the 90s, when the fashion was towards more indie-ish naturalistic stuff in the vein of Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino, but it came surging back in the 2000s with the success of ultra-high-budget sequel series like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars Prequels, Spiderman and that whole wave superhero wave.
So yeah, when you say "most seem to be sequels or remakes", that's true. And it's unfortunate, really. Note that this doesn't mean all movies are universally worse, it just means that there is a definite trend for conservatism and safe bets, which can be contrasted with other times -- like the late 60s/early 70s in the USA, the late 40s through mid-60s in Europe -- where there was a definite trend for wild and experimental things.
As for TV, which has definitely improved immeasurably, I can point to a few things that I think have contributed heavily.
The first is the digital revolution. Shooting on film was expensive, and editing on film was elaborate and limiting. Special effects, except practical ones obviously, were extremely limited. Only the big shows usually got shot on film, and everything else was shot on analogue video, which looks like crap and is severely limiting in what you can do. An all-digital workflow massively opens your options here, and TV adopted it long before film did. TV has tighter deadlines, anything that makes things even 5% faster is a gift from the gods. And digital cameras hit good-enough-for-TV quality a decade ago, while they're only really getting up to as-good-as-35mm-in-the-cinema quality over the next year or two. Plus you get things like digital colour-correction, which makes a huge difference in how professional and detailed a show feels.
So during the late 90s/early 2000s, TV creators suddenly found themselves equipped with cheaper cameras that output footage the editors could use today and edit on a nice Avid for digital broadcast next month. That gave them a ton of freedom to do stuff that hadn't been possible before.
Probably the best example of this is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That show started at the absolute bottom of the budget barrel. The camera they used for the first 4 seasons cost $3200. A small group of friends writes, directs, produces, and stars in it, and got their friends and girlfriends to appear as the secondary characters to save money. The budget for season 1 was basically "this cheque my grandmother sent me for her birthday, and whatever change we find in our couches." That just wasn't possible to do 10 years earlier. The network put them on the air because hey, why not, look how cheap they are -- and the show became a cult hit.
The second is the influence of The Sopranos and The Office (the original). The first proved that high-level serialised dramas could become massively successful. Serialisation was a bit of a dirty word before Sopranos came along. Sopranos was massively, massively successful and respected. It pulled in a billion awards, books were written about its gloriousness, and it attracted attention from respectable film actors and directors who wanted to get involved. Steve Buscemi signed up. Stuff like that wasn't meant to happen -- you graduated from TV to film, you didn't go back to TV once you'd graduated and actually become successful. So that was how big a sensation it was. And I think this is a direct forerunner to film producers getting more involved in the TV world (Frank Darabont on The Walking Dead, Martin Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire, etc).
Sopranos pretty much paved the way for all the 'quality' modern dramas. Things like Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under -- these are all shows that follow Sopranos' example, and they were all commissioned by producers who were saying "We need another Sopranos."
The Office was kind of similar for comedies. The immediate effect of The Office was a more localised -- it was huge in the UK, but the show itself didn't get as colossal an audience overseas as Sopranos did, for a few reasons -- it's short, it comes from a nation that doesn't do a lot of culture-exporting, it was sour and unpalatable to a lot of people. But it was very influential to TV industries and to future shows. They were the vanguard for the new wave of naturalistic single-camera 'realist comedies', the most popular of which is the American version of The Office. Virtually every comedy being made today belongs to that wave. Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Parks & Rec, Community -- would these shows exist if The Office hadn't effectively beaten the multi-camera sitcom to death with its own severed legs? I don't think I've ever seen something die as quickly and as thoroughly as Cheers-style sitcoms died in the early 2000s. It went from "There's something else?" to "Laughing audiences make me want to kill myself" in about 4 days.
There are predecessors to both of these shows, but they're the ones that triggered the craze.
