Obviously there is a lot of variation in the production schedules of different forms of media, but I have noticed that TV series are very good at continually pumping out new episodes, but movies have more leeway to be delayed until the crew can get it right.
But considering the amount of filming/animation/voice acting that goes into producing stuff for TV, wouldn’t it logically make sense that it would take more time to produce a TV show than a movie? As an example, My Little Pony Friendship is Magic consistently had 26 episode seasons, each episode was 22 minutes long, and according the the show’s creator, it is about a year between initial pitch for an episode to final release. At this rate, this is 9 and a half hours of animation, writing, voice acting per year.
Compared to the movie, this was greenlit back in 2014, and was released in 2017 with zero delays. It only last 99 minutes, and while undoubtedly the animation quality got higher, I have a hard time picturing how this alone would have accounted for the production discrepancy. I’d imagine that the voice actors spent more time recording lines for the show than the actual movie because of how much more story they had to do in the show.
Granted, these days most shows do not have this many hours of raw episode runtime. Many cartoons will have 11 minute episodes, or only 20 episodes a season. There are also live action shows that have maybe 10-12 44 minute episodes. Wouldn’t this take up more of the actors’ time than just filming a 2 hour movie?
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The first season of a TV show does take as long as a movie to produce on average. It can take years before the first season of a show is released. It’s only the subsequent seasons that have a shorter turnaround time. That’s because later seasons benefit from most of the initial work being done and they can reuse many assets such as sets, props, CGI models, actors, production staff, etc..
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