Posterized: Promotions to Film for TV Casts

With Downton Abbey (2019) in theaters today and already threatening a sequel let's talk movie spin-offs of TV shows. TV shows have been adapted into feature films for as long as we can recall, but up until the 21st century it was more common for feature films to be adapted into TV shows.

Examples of TV series getting their own theatrical film outing with the original cast intact dates back to, we think, Dragnet (1954) and Batman The Movie (1966), both of which had one theatrical release during their TV runs. But it was fairly rare until recently and it has usually only happened after a television series has wrapped. A large part of this becoming more common obviously has to do with the narrowing gap between how audiences experience TV and film. On a less obvious and more theoretical level we suspect its due to the even newer cultural trend of immediate / perpetual nostalgia. It used to be that there had to be a bit of distance before the populace got collectively teary-eyed with longing but... no longer! 

Batman got a movie in the summer of 1966, even though it has just premiered on television in January of that same year.

You can now be wistful for things you experienced just the year or even a few months before and demand that they come back to you in the closest approximation possible. 

Let's look at some examples of this increasingly popular trend leading up to Downton Abbey (2019). How many of these spinoffs have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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Over & Overs: The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

The Coen Brothers have no shortage of veritable classics on their résumé (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, etc.), but somewhat overlooked within their filmography are the quirky, sweet (read: non-violent, still absurdist) little diversions into optimism, vs. their patented nihilism. And so, sandwiched between the critical and commercial triumphs Barton Fink and Fargo, arrived The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens’ mid-‘90s (25th anniversary, y’all!) ode to the zany, screwball comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

They had me at "You know, for kids.”

I was one of the few who saw The Hudsucker Proxy in theaters—it bombed…hard—at the mall where I worked as a teen (at Subway in the food court, natch). In fact, it wasn’t by chance that I saw The Hudsucker Proxy; I actually sought it out, for reasons I can’t totally recall. But loved it I did, from the very first watch... 

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Review: Ad Astra

by Murtada Elfadl

The thing about having daddy issues is that you can never escape them. No matter how far you travel, even into space. In Ad Astra these issues drive Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut sent on a mission across the solar system to find out the reason behind recent catastrophes,  including fires and plane crashes, taking place on Earth. The kicker here is that his astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones), who went missing in another space expedition 29 years ago, might be connected to what’s happening. Not only does Roy have to confront the dangers awaiting him on his mission, he also has to deal with his feelings about his father and being abandoned by him.

The space odyssey element is surprising twist for writer director James Gray (The Immigrant, Two Lovers) but the father son imbroglio isn’t at all...

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Best Picture / Director Oscar chart updates !

by Nathaniel R

Marriage Story would have been a true blockbuster like Kramer vs Kramer or Terms of Endearment in a different era. Now it will just stream but could still be a big player at the Oscars.

There’s still so much we don’t know.

That’s an important fact to start with because reading online discourse about Oscar predictions each year is like pretending we live in a perpetual January when the precursors are well underway and the template is already set which will only vary slightly from organization to organization/pundit to pundit. Oscar fanatics (and pundits) never know as much as they pretend to know early on. History is filled with films with breathless first screenings that didn’t amount to much at the Oscars and vice versa. These things take time and all parts of the cycle should be considered when making predictions. If your predictions are exactly the same as someone else's this early, take a risk. Then you can be wrong in different ways instead of in the same way. Haha.

Five Very Important Things We Don’t Yet Know...

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10th Anniversary of Jennifer's Body

By Spencer Coile 

Jennifer’s Body was never meant to find mainstream success. A film about women, made by women, and starring women - a campy flick about a possessed teenage girl who kills men after she seduces them, no less - was somehow expected to fulfill every man’s fantasy. At long last, we would finally witness Megan Fox naked on-screen. Rejoice, for she would also be kissing her co-star, Amanda Seyfried, for our enjoyment. Indeed, the male gaze was directed firmly at Jennifer’s Body, waiting to see if it would disappoint.  

And sure enough, it did. Critics were quick to call it empty and vapid, hardly anyone bothered to see it, and Jennifer’s Body was quickly forgotten. But is any of this surprising? Despite their undeniable cultural cache in 2009, both Megan Fox and screenwriter Diablo Cody were experiencing an ongoing backlash that reeked of sexism. And quite plainly: many weren’t ready to see, let alone enjoy, a film about male fear controlled entirely by female sexuality. 

But perhaps for those same reasons, Jennifer’s Body is claiming the cult status it was always destined to have. 

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