In a recent interview, veteran actor Dustin Hoffman made some pretty sweeping statements about the current state of film.
"I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been - in the 50 years that I’ve been doing it, it’s the worst."
That's pretty cut and dry and coming from someone with his level of experience, this isn't just some cynic walking in off the street. Hoffman's been at the coalface in both mainstream and arthouse cinema for five decades. He's seen the highs and lows, the creative zenith of '70s American cinema to the remake model that's currently at cinemas.
He's not wrong, in fairness. Television is currently outstripping film in terms of original content and mid-range dramas with topline casts. Ten, fifteen years ago, the likes of True Detective would have been more at home in a cinema than on our TV screens. The likes of The Affair, Borgen, The Bridge, Girls and even comedies like Broad City and Workaholics would have been more likely to find an audience on movies rather than on TV.
Indeed, TV studios would have easily passed on these rather than take a chance. Pre-HBO, there were very few TV shows that had that kind of quality. NYPD Blue, Murder One and David Lynch's Twin Peaks took elements from film and turned them into something palatable for television whereas film was heading for bigger budgets and better special effects.
It's nothing new, really. Film has always been more of an event than television. The big screen will also be more amiable to larger-than-life vistas and explosions than television ever could be, even now. However, with the advent of high-def television, the odds are evening. Slowly, television is edging out film in terms of spectacle.
Battlestar Galactica, which is oft hailed as one of the best sci-fi shows ever made, regularly boasted impressive CGI. In the fourth season of Game of Thrones, the production budget topped out at something close to $6,000,000 per episode. That's expected to rise to around $10,000,000 in the fifth and sixth season. Westworld, another HBO production, has producers JJ Abrams, Jonathan Nolan and Bryan Burk on its staff and a cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright and Evan Rachel Wood.
Hannibal, adapted from the Thomas Harris' novels concerning Hannibal Lecter, are regularly cited by critics as being one of the most visually daring, impressionistic television series of the last ten years. When has that been said about a film and has inspired a fervent fanbase that's currently campaigning for its survival?
Dustin Hoffman isn't the only one who's decrying the current state of cinema. In a interview, William Friedkin - the director of French Connection, The Exorcist and To Live & Die In LA - observed that the budgets for a single Hollywood blockbuster now would have been comparable to an entire slate for a studio in the '80s and '90s. Big studios are putting all their eggs into a single tentpole and, as a result, smaller projects are finding it harder to get big studios backing them.
For studios, it's simply a case of numbers. This summer alone, the likes of Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron and others have broken every box-office record going and the trend shows no signs of stopping. The Force Awakens, due for release in December, is quietly expected to have the biggest opening of all time. Why would they change a formula that's working?
To get to the crux of Hoffman's original statement - film's the worst it's ever been - we think he's wrong. Dead wrong. Film is flourishing. Box office receipts have never been higher. Studios are making oceans of cash and actors are demanding bigger and better deals for their work. The question is content and quality. The type of nuanced, informed scripts that were commonplace in film are now migrating to television.
Television is affording screenwriters a chance to be more inventive and different than ever before, simply because they don't hang on a single weekend's takings to determine its success. It's not to say that film is losing out to talented scripts. Just look at something like It Follows or The Overnight, two films that flew under the radar but have some of the best scripts we've seen in years. Studios aren't pushing them because the formula doesn't match the film. They have no top-line names, the films cost considerably less to make and the storylines - one about a spirit that takes the form of people you love and the other about swinging in modern LA - aren't easily conducive to film.
The type of film that Dustin Hoffman remembers from the '70s and '80s just doesn't exist anymore. It's migrated to television. What we're left with on film is something that's evolving to keep apace with the likes of Netflix, video-on-demand services and piracy. Films have to be bigger, louder and more spectacle simply to entice people to get into the cinema to watch them. The type of layered, dialogue-heavy films that Scorsese, Friedkin and Nichols made during Hoffman's type are now on television.
