Streaming remakes movies into shows

The Future. Last year, two movies were re-edited and re-released as high-profile streaming series, blurring the line between the two formats. If more filmmakers take on similar experiments, under-the-radar indies and box office bombs could get second chances at becoming hits on the small screen… and give streamers a cheap way to license “new” titles.

Runtime marathon
Younger audiences are more likely to binge hours of a show than watch a long movie… so some films are adapting.

• Faraway Downs is actually a re-edited and expanded version of Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 epic, Australia. It premiered as a six-part series on Hulu.
• BlackBerry, directed by Matt Johnson, premiered as a film early last year and then was cut up and expanded into a three-part series on AMC in the US six months later.

These titles aren’t the first to re-release as series (Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage did it back in 1973), but this may be the first time that they were done with such radical ambitions.

• Luhrmann took the footage he shot and constructed a “significant” new plot for the series.
• Johnson and his team always planned for the dual release to create two separate revenue streams.

And, yes, the original movies are still widely available to watch. Could this be a new lane in the streaming economy?