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
Something else that isn’t mentioned is what happens in the edit room. On a TV series, you have multiple editors working on multiple episodes, and VFX start basically as soon as there’s a rough cut. Editing is happening throughout shooting, but you are cutting and finishing in smaller percentages than a movie. So, even on larger budget TV productions, episode 1 could be in final mix, color, VFX before episode 10 has completed shooting.
Also, in movies, the director is king, and gets to spend a luxurious amount of time in the edit room. In TV, the producer is king, so the editor gets their 4 or 5 mandated edit days and then often peace out to direct another episode or work on a different show and the producers take over while directors are on set. Things run concurrently in TV far more than in movies. If you stretched out the timeline end to end, bigger TV shows would take at least to make as a movie.
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