I was reading an article about Netflix, and the writer had this to say about why Netflix is dropping a lot of movies in favor of adding more TV shows:

"(S)ome of it is due to the decreasing importance of film in pop culture. Where once film (meaning a piece of video content that premieres in a cinema) was the height of pop-culture achievement, it is increasingly a carnival ride.

Put another way, would the average American seem more out touch with the zeitgeist if he or she hadn’t seen 2013’s highest grossing film, Iron Man 3, or didn’t know what “The Red Wedding” was?"

--Josh Herr, The Fiscal Times

I thought that his description of the current state of film as a "carnival ride" was fitting, but his assertion that film's importance in popular culture at large was decreasing got me to thinking. When I was a kid, there were certain films that everyone simply HAD to see--THE GRADUATE, BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE GODFATHER, THE EXORCIST, and on and on. All of those films were "important" in some way, and they were able to launch endless discussions. At that time, television was generally thought of as mindless entertainment, with the occasional ROOTS or THE DAY AFTER to give a tip of the hat to quality. These days, television shows are what you MUST watch to be up on things--GAME OF THRONES, ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, TRUE DETECTIVE. When was the last time a film was seen by the public at large as being as important (or even as interesting) as these TV shows? Sure, THE AVENGERS and AVATAR made a boatload of money, but they didn't fuel discussion (except among fanboys) in the same way that, say, LOST did or HOUSE OF CARDS does.

So, the question is: Has television finally supplanted movies as the preeminent form of entertainment? Have movies been relegated to the junior varsity position that television held for so long?

I still don't know what "Red Wedding" is. I'll admit to not watching as much Movies as I used to and turning to a television series more often.

It has more to do with the TV deals made with Netflix vs movie studio deals. TV is cheaper to buy, so it's no surprise Netflix is more TV driven these days. Just look at their original "series." They aren't making original movies much (if at all).

I think TV has made it easier to tell ully formed stories, whereas movies don't have much time at all. Plus TV can afford to be more risky and /or edgy compares to films coming out lately.

Not for me. Except for watching the news every once in a while or Jeopardy, I don't watch television. I also don't have cable and the only TV show I own on physical media is Twin Peaks. 95% of what I view on my television are movies on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Movies to me seem more important than TV ever will. Pretty much everything on TV has been modeled from movies, more or less.

Over the last four decades TV shows have evolved from strictly episodic — you can watch them in any order and they are much the same — to series with long story arcs that need to be seen in order to appreciate the story. Babylon 5, for example, was intended as a "five year novel for television". That model is now very common and it makes the storytelling much richer. Compared to a long story arc TV "novel", a two hour movie is more like a short story.

The richer, more detailed storytelling in the better TV shows has supplanted movies in some ways. I do find that I get more enjoyment out of favorite TV series than I do favorite movies, in part because they are so much longer, detailed, and more involving.

Also, home theater has made the ritual of going to the movies quite different from what it was many years ago. Back before the VCR if you didn't catch a movie in the theater you were out of luck until it appeared on TV, trimmed and butchered with commercials every few minutes. Now there is no particular reason to see a movie in a theater because you can catch it later when it hits disc or Netflix or several other viewing options. That has certainly changed the movie-going experience, with many here rarely or never venturing to a public theater, for reasons much discussed in other threads.

So, yes, "films have lost their importance" in our increasingly fragmented world. But that's not the same thing as saying they are irrelevant. Before movies, live theater was dominant. A century after movies supplanted the stage, live theater is still with us. It remains one of many options for seeing stories performed, just not the dominant one. Things change.

Interesting question. It does seem the balance has flipped. The fact that Iron Man 3 was the highest grossing movie of 2013 speaks volumes on the subject.

Most movies today are formulated to the nth degree to get maximum profit in the first few weeks. They are test marketed, written by committee, and tweaked to death. They have to hit the same beats in three acts. Indie movies fare a little better, but there's not much room for telling a new story well in big budget Hollywood. If The Godfather were adapted today, it would be as a cable series.

There are still more bad TV shows than good though. But I think the fact that it's still easier & cheaper to get a TV show on the air allows a little more flexibility & room for something good to slip through once in a while.

No. Studios have just jacked up the licensing costs of their movies to Netflix, or withholding them altogether. So Netflix is trying minimize the importance of movies. The fact is that the movie selection on Netflix sucks ass. They obviously never have new releases. They clearly have a good relationship with Disney and Marvel, but many studios don't want to give Netflix their best movies.

No.

No, but the fact that there is plenty of great television out there as of late makes it seem so.

You're wrong, but let me tell you why you're wrong.

Out of the "major" independent studios, you have FilmDistrict, Open Road Films, Relativity Media, and The Weinstein Company who have first-run deals with (and only with) Netflix. Rather than opting to go with HBO, Showtime, or Starz, these studios went directly to Netflix. Why do you think Amazon courted A24 to have their movies first-run on Prime? There's plenty of great titles currently on the Netflix service due to these specific deals. For example, I finally watched Don Jon in 1080p and its OAR of 2.40:1 (alongside 5.1) on Netflix late last night. You can't say that about the movie channels.

Netflix also has first-run deals with a lot of the smaller independent studios to such as IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures. Just like the deals above, this also gives them access to their back catalog as well.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

In regards to the powerhouse studios themselves, DreamWorks Animation and Sony Pictures Animation have first-run deals with Netflix (Netflix also has the distribution rights now to any future DreamWorks Animation produced television show). Netflix (just like Amazon Prime and Redbox Instant) also have a deal with EPIX which grants them both first-run and catalog titles from the Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM library. In addition, Netflix has a pact with Universal to get first look at any titles that HBO passed up acquisition on.

Then there's Netflix's deal with Walt Disney. Right now its strictly for catalog titles, but that will change next year when Disney's agreement with Starz expires and Netflix will get to distribute their first-run titles instead. Expect December 2015 to have an influx of Disney titles on the service.

Now, the above text was only meant for first-run titles only. Don't forget about Netflix (like Hulu) has access to Miramax's catalog amongst many of their other distribution deals (Netflix has access to all new ABC Studios and Fox-produced television shows [amongst others] right after the season aired).

This means:

• First-run titles with Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures still reign supreme at HBO.
• First-run live-action titles from Sony still go to Starz.
• If you pay for Showtime, good job at throwing your money away.

That means everything else in regards to first-run is on Netflix...

This is on top of all the solid original programming Netflix has been putting out there including the awesome and recently-added documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

But just because I want to prove people like you how fucking wrong you are when you complain that Netflix's movie selection sucks ass, here's just some of the first-run titles added recently:

13 Sins, Bad Grandpa .5, Escape From Tomorrow, Gambit, Girl Most Likely, Hatchet III, Homefront, Lawless, Machete Kills, The Master, Oldboy, Out of the Furnace, Wolf Creek 2, and World War Z amongst others.

If you're a genre fan, you just jizzed in your pants. However, for a service that I am my wife pays $7.99 a month for, that's a pretty legit deal if I wanted to watch movies I already saw in theaters with MoviePass I've never seen these films before. I'd recommend watching 13 Sins first.

To actually respond to the OP and the topic at hand:

I feel people are starting to look away from the current theatrical distribution model and looking elsewhere to get their entertainment. I have a MoviePass account and my wife and I keep having the conversation, "Should we cancel it?" We are DINK and outside of times I have to travel for work, we have plenty of free time. Over the past few months, making a journey to the movie theater tends to be more of a pain in the ass. While we get to bypass the expensive ticket prices ($11 for 2D, $14 for 3D, and $18 for IMAX are the average prices in Vegas) and the concession items (we're vegan), it just sucks having to sit in a room for two hours with people who simply don't give a fuck about anyone or anything else but themselves. I am sure most people share similar feelings and its just one of the many reasons 2014's box office has been a drought.

There's probably also the reason that outside of the independents, most studios are pushing out shit films. Unless its a sequel, reboot, or remake, the studios don't want to release it.

There's also been the switch from DVD to Blu-ray over the past few years and the question is how long physical media will still be around for? I used to go from purchasing tons of physical media to now next-to-nothing.

If I have 40 hours of free time a week, do I want to spend that watching films or possibly doing something else that doesn't require me to leave my house? Video games, Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, etc, etc, etc. With how many avenues we can entertain ourselves, its no wonder people are looking away from films and getting their source of entertainment from elsewhere.

If somebody made a movie that people wanted to talk about, that movie would be important. There just haven't really been too many movies like that in recent years. I remember contributing a post here not long after I joined in which I said that I'd seen a particular film even though I was sure I wouldn't like it simply because I wanted to be part of the conversation about it. (I think it was AVATAR.) And someone here (I don't remember who) thought that was a stupid reason to see a film.

I can't recall a film that generated a lot of significant conversation in the culture at large since, oh, I dunno, DO THE RIGHT THING? Or maybe SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Film buffs went back to the movies en masse in 1998 to see THE THIN RED LINE because it was Malick's first in 20 years. I'm probably missing a few. Tarantino's films usually generate a lot of conversation, but often in niche groups. Certainly DJANGO got a lot of people talking.

Hollywood used to regularly make movies that mattered in the larger culture. Look at something like THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, which focused on returning veterans right at the time the veterans were returning. The culture got quite a boost from it. Or ON THE WATERFRONT, which dealt with the whole issue of "naming names" right at the height of the Hollywood blacklist. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE dealt with teenage restlessness in modern suburbia and provided the teenage audience with a ready-made martyr in the form of James Dean, who was killed before the film was released. DR. STRANGELOVE dared to satirize nuclear brinkmanship at the height of the Cold War. I saw that film at the tender age of 10 and it showed me the absurdity of international relations, a valuable lesson, I daresay, to be exposed to in 1964. Or FIRST BLOOD and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART 2, which gave vent to the frustration and bitterness of Vietnam veterans some ten years after the war. And these were all popular films.

I don't see TV shows today like the ones mentioned above generating that kind of conversation. People watch "Breaking Bad," "Game of Thrones," "The Walking Dead," "Boardwalk Empire," "True Blood," "The Sopranos," et al for a variety of reasons, mostly because they get hooked on the stories, not because they're "important." The material is generally pretty trite. It's B-movie stuff allowed to play out like high drama and given a high production gloss, clever, skillful writing, and excellent actors. Since there's such a dearth of good storytelling in the movies, people turn to television dramas to find it. But few people are having political or ethical or cultural conversations about these shows. Except maybe "The Sopranos," when the Italian-American Institute in New York launched protests of it only to come smack up against one of its biggest fans, New York's then-mayor and a prominent Italian-American in his own right, Rudolph Giuliani. Or maybe "House of Cards," although I still haven't seen an episode, nor have I ever had a conversation about it. I remember seeing a couple of episodes of "The Newsroom" at the urging of my boss, but I found that it simply generated conversation only among people who believed the world existed exactly as it did in the show, reality be damned.

When they make important movies again, the movies will become "important" again. But you need filmmakers smart and perceptive enough to figure out what's going on in the larger culture and tackle it. No one making films today is quite ready to step up to that plate.

I think like everything else, the movie audiences are becoming more fragmented, similar to how there are a ton of cable/satellite channels now, but only 30 years ago there were maybe 40, including local broadcast. Movies being "important" is kind of beside the point. The Thin Red Line didn't do great business, I don't think audiences saw that is one as "important." Probably the most important movie in the last year was the documentary "Inequality For All." But most people don't want to go to see movies that are "important". Did people go see Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jaws, etc. because they were important? Heck no. But movies that appeal to the masses like those are hard to come by when teens like certain kind of movies, adults and older adults like others, and everyone is fine with that it seems.

Red Wedding. Game of Thrones. A wedding is an ambush and they killed off half the cast in five minutes.

Something like that. I haven't watched it.

By your own admission, three of the biggest studios do not have first run on Netflix. That's a lot a lot of major movies not available. The fact is that Netflix movie selection is very limited and sucks ass. I am not saying that the price is bad for what you get. But, you can't even pay for rentals of new releases on a per film basis like on Amazon or Directv. So they don't get Fox new releases for unlimited streaming. You would think it would be smart to be able to rent a Fox new release for a couple bucks for 48 hours of streaming that one movie. Nope.

Netflix has a strong incentive to convince people that movies are no longer important, even though its very existence was founded on DVD rentals and being known as having a huge and deep library. They want to be able to convince people that it's perfectly fine that they don't have this movie or that movie because movies are no longer important. But, you can spend weeks binging on this tv show or that one.

Netflix just can't afford to license every studio's films, assuming every studio was willing to license to Netflix, and it doesn't look they are. There is no question that studios will back different services, and the streaming business will be fragmented. I don't blame Netflix for that. It's just how it is.

I'm glad you love Netflix and appear to jizzing all over yourself about their genre films currently available. Netflix still has a strong incentive to diminish films.

Too many movies watered down for MPAA approval, so they are losing their impact. Its ruining the movie industry.

The evangelicals may complain about nudity, sex scenes, and violence, but you will notice series like the Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome were big hits. If they had watered those shows down to cater to the average 13 yr old, they would have been forgettable duds.

I rarely goto the movies anymore, as there is very little originality in Hollywood these days. 99% of summer blockbusters are forgettable movies made for teenagers with no attention span, and the Christmas movies (which are geared for the Oscars) aren't as great as they used to be either. Just look at the last 10 Best Picture Winners compared with the 25 years before that, and that will tell you how much a drop in quality the movie industry has undergone.

The past 10-15 years have been the golden age of TV Drama's, and they keep churning them out year after year. Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc are more interesting then most movies they churn out these days.

I just think don't think there is much more they can do to make an original movie, as the old saying, "Been there, done that." Plus the rise of Superhero movies being so profitable that I could care less about has driven me away from movies during the summer months.

You can make dozens of original movies from the same historical event (Titanic, Pompeii, WWII, 9/11, etc)

There are thousands/millions of characters involved with every major event. There were hundreds of actual Titanic survivors with a different story to tell.

Or in the case of the recent Pompeii movie the characters are obviously fictionalized. Very contrived if not silly. But, with some decent writing and a decent script, they could have made an original movie on par with HBO's "Rome". Or, considering the special effects in "Pompeii", even better than "Rome".

I think that you may be on to something here...could it be that, not counting what is now the "old guard" (Marty Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, etc.) who seem to have no difficulty getting studio backing for almost any project that they want to do, all the best behind-the-scenes talent is gravitating toward working in television precisely because they'll be offered more creative freedom and won't have to dumb down their visions?

To me, it seems that (for the most part) the better storytelling is found on television, while the lowest-common-denominator entertainment that blows up stuff real good is now in the cinemas--which is exactly the opposite of the TV/film dichotomy of the '60s and '70s.

The best television these days is more than just gloss and sheen. Whether it's "IMPORTANT" is subjective. Perhaps the reason you're not hearing as many people talk about one specific show is that there are millions of entertainment outlets for people these days, so very few things in any medium (or hell, even real life events) can hold everyone's attention the way they used to. But I'll take something like Hannibal or The Wire or Deadwood over most of the films I see in a given year. There is a lot of quality TV out there right now.

As for the question, TV has become more cinematic and showrunners have gotten better at telling stories over the length of a season or multiple seasons than they had in the past. In this case, having more channels helps, because these stations need content and sometimes they're willing to let someone do their own thing simply because they have to fill the time and if it becomes a hit then they can sit back and say that they just knew they were working with such brilliant people that it would all work out and blah blah blah. Has that decreased the importance of cinema? On a cultural level, perhaps. But it's not just the quality of TV that's gone up. The quality of film exhibition has gone down. Concession and ticket prices are soaring. Smartphones allow people to be even bigger asses than they were before, ruining a night out for everyone else. Meanwhile, home theaters are ever easier to purchase and set up. Who do you know that has a TV in their living room under 40"? How about 50? 60? And even a family of four can figure out how to set up a soundbar, which is often good enough for them. Throw in a real sound system like most of us have? Forget it.

So people wait longer to see movies, which means they talk about them less. TV shows are immediate. You can watch them in complete comfort. You can see the episode, it only takes 30-60 minutes, and be online discussing it by 10 PM your time. With services like HBO Go, you don't even have to worry about geographic restrictions, you can watch it on east coast time. It's immediate and since these shows are still episodic, you speculate on what's going to happen next. If a film deliberately sets up a sequel, it feels incomplete. Not so with TV. Heck, some shows barely even resolve storylines within a single season, but that still doesn't feel like a cheat.

So has film lost some of its cache? Yes, it has. That doesn't mean important films can't be made, or that no film is worthy of conversation. But there's more and more competition, and studios have to start taking risks again if they want people to pay attention.

I think you have a point, as the movies have been dumbed down to the teenage viewer because they know they can make more money that way.

The advent of CGI with Jurassic Park was the downfall of movies and the rise of what I call 'dummy' action movies. CGI is such an easy tool and an easy sell to the average joe moviegoer, and the story and characters are sacrificed because of it.

I always say if Jaws was made today, the CGI shark would overshadow the actors, and the characters would be one dimensional. The great thing about Jaws is because they couldn't get the damn shark to work, he didn't appear in the movie til an hour in, and it forced Spielberg to focus on the characters more.

Studios do make movies about Important Topics. The Academy Awards are full of them.

Wolf of Wall Street (Theft in the financial sector.)
American Hustle (Corruption in Washington.)
Dallas Buyer's Club (Lack of sympathy from Washington.)
Philomena (Casual cruelty by the Catholic church.)
12 Years a Slave (What it says on the box.)

That's five movies released just last year about the ordinary people getting the shaft from the rich and powerful. Critics loved them, but box office was poor. People don't want to watch movies about people like them struggling and getting hurt. They want to watch movies where Superman, Iron Man, and Thor see ordinary people in danger and come to their rescue.

Depends on what you mean by "important". If you mean in a historical sense then no, movies are more still important. With that said I never thought of movies as anything more than art and entertainment and never thought any movie as "important". Same goes for TV. Nothing is 'important' outside of a pop culture sense.

Now if you're talking pop culture importance then yes, television has taken over. It seems that when we talk about the great movies of our time we bring up films from decades ago. It's more pop culture relevant to have seen the Godfather or Star Wars than anything from the last 10 years. Even great movies of our current time are quickly forgotten. I remember the hubbub when Brokeback Mountain came out. Everyone said how great the film was and how it'll be remembered for years. 10 years later and it's hardly remembered at all. Not in the way the real greats are at least.

Meanwhile, we're in a golden age of TV. Throw out a poll and ask people what the best TV series drama ever is and most people will choose something from the last 15 years. Most people would probably pick Breaking Bad and that ended less than a year ago. So yes, in today's pop culture, TV is more important.