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Why film adaptations of classic TV shows so often disappoint – and how to fix it

Paul Byrnes

There's no truth to the rumour that the last original movie idea departed Hollywood recently on a slow boat to China. That happened years ago. The dominant business in Tinseltown is now reproduction: repeating (sequels), revisiting (prequels) and recasting (rebooting). Cannibalism is the new best practice. Why spend $50 million to advertise new characters and an unfamiliar story when you can base a movie on TV characters that already have a wide following?

Out now or soon to open here are big-screen versions of CHiPS, Baywatch, Wonder Woman, Power Rangers and Ninjago (a Lego movie). Those are all based on TV shows. There have been many others in the past two years and the trend will continue into 2018 with new films from TV franchises that have gone mega on film: Mission: Impossible, Transformers, Star Trek and a third Spongebob Squarepants movie.

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A group of high-school students stumble across a space ship, and in doing so are given super powers with which they must save the world.

This only seems new. Wikipedia lists more than 260 TV shows that have spawned more than 500 movies over the past 50 years (many were remade several times or had sequels). The hard part is coming up with a list of good ones.

My list would include The Untouchables by Brian de Palma, The Blues Brothers (one of many that came out of a Saturday Night Live sketch), The Fugitive from 1993, Life of Brian and the other Monty Python movies, a couple of the Muppet movies, some of the Star Trek movies, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (based on a British series Traffik), and the original Mission: Impossible movie (De Palma again). Your list would be different but not necessarily longer. One of the mysteries about this syndrome is why it persists when so many of the movies are duds, not just in critical terms but box office as well.

Who can forget or forgive the movie versions of Bewitched, Land of the Lost, Wild Wild West, Maverick, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Avengers (the original British series from the 1960s, remade with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman). And if you actually loved all of those, what about the movies based on Sex and the City, Miami Vice, Get Smart, Sgt Bilko and 21 Jump Street?

How and why does Hollywood get it wrong so often in this caper? No one really knows, but I can hazard some guesses, after sitting sit through so many of them in the past 30 years as a film critic.

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We all know that TV and movies are different beasts. For the first half of the 20th century, movies were the dominant entertainment form in western, and many non-western, cultures. Gradually, TV took over the world, with a different set of aesthetics – more disposable, less enveloping, but more intimate because it was right there in our living rooms. As TV's market power rose, all the big movie studios became corporatised parts of larger media conglomerates. These were inherently more conservative than the old Hollywood.

Even as Jaws and Star Wars killed off the idea of medium profits in Hollywood, costs of production kept rising, polarising budgets: either very cheap or very expensive. For a long time, the studios were able to sustain themselves with ancillaries – video and cable TV, then DVD sales. Most of those markets have disappeared, so Hollywood has had to look for ways to reduce risk – even though the whole business is based on taking risks. The most obvious way is to raid the cupboard rather than take a punt on new ideas or new characters. Shooting a modern movie might cost $100 million but marketing it can add another $100 million. With a known property, you might cut that cost in half.

The question of how TV aesthetics changed movies is tougher to pin down, but undeniable. In the first instance, American TV in the 1950s showed lots of movies, which produced a generation of filmmakers who were literate about the history of the medium. Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas have all cited the influence of TV on their development. Some of the influence came from Golden Age Hollywood, but a lot of it came from pulp TV, science-fiction shows and comic books.

Those same things influenced generations of Hollywood executives – which is why Marvel is perhaps the most powerful company in current movie production, with its comic-book franchises. I would argue that the rise of superheroes, like the rise of TV-to-movie adaptations, is driven by nostalgia – and nostalgia is a fickle mistress. Many of the current TV-to-movie remakes are based on shows of the 1960s and '70s, the ones most recent Hollywood players were raised on. The problem is that nostalgia can't carry a movie. As any scriptwriter will tell you, movies are built on script structure, and nostalgia isn't a structural element. It's more like a vibe, as in The Castle. It might provide a starting point, but it won't get you that win in court.

In redoing Starsky and Hutch or Land of the Lost, as examples, the vibe is the idea that the innocence of those earlier shows is inherently funny or ripe for parody – an attitude of superiority, of sorts. The fashions of Starsky and Hutch or The Dukes of Hazzard are quaint for modern audiences, especially when you cast some of their favourite comic actors, like Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller or Steve Carell. The list of failures above shows that none of those actors is bulletproof. Land of the Lost stank in movie form and Will Ferrell was the stinkee. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson brought self-consciousness to Starsky and Hutch but there was not a moment's tension in the story. At least in the original TV series, they encountered danger and obstacles as they went after the bad guys.

These new comic stars come largely from sketch comedy on TV, particularly Saturday Night Live, where parody and impressions are enough to launch a career. When they graduate to the big screen, many of their movies feel like a series of sketches strung together, rather than a story. They're selling comic schtick, a short game, rather than the longer game of narrative, which has to carry us through 100 minutes or more. In short, they're still too much like TV, not enough like a movie, but audiences raised on TV may not notice or care about that difference. A sketch-like movie is enough to satisfy millions, as Ferrell's career plainly shows.

The irony is that television has re-invented itself in the last 20 years, by virtue of one factor: cable TV's freedom from the dead hand of American TV censorship. That allowed HBO to unleash a revolution of quality, driven by writers rather than producers, such that TV is now a more flexible dramatic medium than mainstream cinema. And here's the rub: TV is now cannibalising movies for material, just as much as the other way around. Fargo, the TV series, showed the path but there are many more coming (see story below).

The cross-fertilisation suggests the old boundaries are dissolving. The internet may destroy TV as we know it – companies like Amazon and Netflix are already on that path; piracy and the rise of China continue to exert huge pressure on movie producers, trying to guess what the Chinese want. That may bring the cycle of recycled TV shows to a slow halt. After all, if a billion Chinese have never heard of Mr Ed, there's not much point in digging up that old dead horse, even if he could now speak Mandarin.

Or the trend may just limp along, until someone in Hollywood remembers that writers, rather than recycling, are the key. New figures this week claim that Hollywood screenwriters' wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen by 21 per cent since 2010. More than twice as many writers now work in TV, where they are more valued and more powerful. If movie producers want new ideas, they're going to have to lure the best of them back to the big screen.

CHiPS is released in cinemas on April 6.  Wonder Woman and Baywatch are due out in June. 


From movies to TV

The worm has come full circle. Even as movies continue to devour TV shows, the TV industry is now devouring movies for remake rights. And the internet production companies are biting off chunks of Hollywood like Godzilla gone amok.

If the rights are cheap or already owned and the characters are well-enough known, someone somewhere has had the idea. Fox in 2014 announced it was redeveloping the Tom Hanks comedy Big, proving that no classic is safe. Hanks is popular in this area: Bachelor Party, Splash and The Money Pit have also been in redevelopment.

Amazon is doing the same with Scorsese's thriller The Departed, modernised and reset in Chicago. It doesn't matter if the original movie was good or bad: From Hell, by the Hughes brothers, an awful movie, has been in development at FX.

NBC has been at work on a 24-style reimagining of In the Line of Fire and Spike Lee is doing a 10-part reinvention of his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, from 1986.

Development can be just as hellish in TV as in movies, so the list changes all the time, but the following have all been mentioned: The Lost Boys, Rambo, Taken, Galaxy Quest, Friday the 13th and Fatal Attraction. I guess she didn't die in the bathtub, after all.

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