Why do ~2 hour movies take 2-3 years to make, while an 6+ hour TV season can be made in 1 year?
In: 1947
In general, movies have a lot more locations that they shoot on. This means that they have to set up the sound and lighting and cameras every time, and generally movies spend a lot more time making sure those are as good as possible. You can do a movie in a lot less time if you’re willing to make the production simpler, such as having just one room that the movie is shot in, but most movies that take years not only have a lot of different locations, but also have a lot of computer special effects that can take months to complete.
The model of TV is to be fast and cheap. You have to make a lot of hours of content, on a small budget and do it fairly quickly, because you’ve got to get to air! TV shoots fast. But also in TV, each scene isn’t as important, you have a lot of time and content, you don’t need to get everything perfect. In a movie you only have 1 chance to get it right. So you have to make ever second count.
In movies, they may spend days shooting a single take or a single interaction. In TV they may do the same thing in an hour or hours. You don’t have the time, budget, or needs to make it exactly perfect, get it done and get on to the next shot.
Movies also tend to make heavy use of location shoots, and things like CGI. They also have really long pre-production times, (getting everything ready before the shoot) and post production (getting everything set after its done, like editing, and special effects — and then reshoots) – plus a long window for marketing the movie.
**tl;dr**: TV is designed to be done fast and good enough, movies are designed to be just right, and that takes a lot of extra time
Movies have a lot of money because they’re expected to *make* a lot of money. All of that extra time is spent going to different places, making better effects, shooting scenes over and over again, and sometimes even rewriting scripts and redoing parts of the film. Often the film is screened to test audiences and sometimes this can cause the studio to change parts of the film.
TV has a smaller budget and a much tighter deadline. If they don’t have shows ready to show on time the network has to find something else to do with the time slot and will NOT be happy about it. So they can’t redo things to a certain extent, and they just have to run with what they have.
You could run a movie like a TV show, but it might not be as satisfying. And some TV shows take their time these days too, so the line is blurred. But compare the quality of a show like *Stranger Things*, which takes a long time and a lot of money to film, to the quality of *Days of Our Lives*, which releases 5 episodes per week and has for a decade.
You know how most movies usually look way better than most TV series? Yeah, all that “look” takes work, which means people’s time, which means money.
So for the same amout of money, a production company can make a season’s worth of okay looking content, or two hours’ worth of exquisite cinematic brilliance.
*Some* movies take 2-3 years to make. The “blockbusters” with lots of CG, locations, etc.
Other movies that are just people talking in ordinary places with no pirate ships, monsters, or giant fights can be made in less than a year.
Planning. Not all movies take 2-3 years to make, and there are plenty that are made in under a year. The big ones know they have a lot of time (IE: Money) and therefore plan accordingly, shooting on many different sets/locations at different times of year, and then putting a lot of budget into post-production (VFX and editing).
A TV show on the other hand knows from the get go that they have only about a year before the next season needs to start production, so they scale back on a lot of things. Not to mention the budget which tends to be lower on TV shows. They don’t shoot at as many locations, and they write the shows to only include VFX and stuff that can get done in the time and budget allotted.
It usually takes more than a year to make the first season of a TV show. After that, you have a lot of things figured out: you hired your actors, writers, and crew, your recurring sets are built, etc. The actual time spent filming is only part of the production time.
A lot of great answers are already here, but I’ll throw out one more thing I don’t see mentioned yet… TV shows will typically have multiple different directors each season, each responsibility for different episodes whereas a movie has a single director for the whole movie. That means TV shows can work on multiple episodes at the same time. Take GOT that was mentioned in other comments, they would have 4 to 6 different directors per season. So while one director was in one location filming scenes for Kings Landing, another could be in another location filming scenes at the Wall, another filming scenes in Dorne, etc. Even different scenes at the same location for different episodes could have one director filming a scene, while another is working on their scene nearby but on a different set (assuming it was different actors in the scene). In a movie with a single director though, they are involved with filming each and every scene.
Another factor (for sitcoms especially) is the multi-camera approach. By filming with multiple cameras at the same time, they can capture different angles and therefore use fewer takes to get the scene. Lighting problem for a few seconds on one camera? Just switch and use one of the others rather than having to reshoot the scene. Plus some of the cameras are always in a fixed location for each set piece, so rather than having to worry about the cameraman moving around following the action, they just have to zoom in and out as appropriate. Movies (and many drama TV shows, some sitcoms too) are filmed with a single camera. It typically means more takes as they have to worry about getting camera angles right and worry more about the correct lighting and sound, etc.
Finally one last point to mention is set design. TV shows will usually have a handful of set locations that they use over and over. They can just leave these locations setup and just make minor changes they might need episode after episode. For movies, there’s a lot more time needed to build each set, make it look perfect, tear it down, build another set, etc.
My experience is that tv series are extremely sparse on content, there’s a ton of “blah blah” filler moments. Whereas a feature film only has a couple hours to convey a ton of story.
The latest Tolkien series on Amazon is a good example… I felt like I watched 8 hours of video to get 30 minutes of story, the rest was all filler. The acting, well, it was tv-grade acting, which implies to me that they didn’t spend days getting any one scene perfect. It is far easier to produce content like that, as opposed to a film where you are constantly jumping scenes and pushing the narrative forward. And every scene has to be perfect.
I was just an extra on a show that’s currently on Amazon Prime. I was there for six days, 12 hours every day. The scene I’m in is maybe a minute. After doing it, I do. It understand how movies or shows make any money at all, or how they ever get edited. Every scene was shot multiple times and they weren’t paying us a small amount. Really made me realize how much money must be in the movie industry
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