What Counts as a Movie?

The end of "Stranger Things" brought up an interesting existential question that I haven't thought about in a while: what counts as a movie?

The last episode of "Stranger Things," titled "The Rightside Up," screened in theaters on December 31st, which was a boon for movie theaters who reported making at least $25 million in concessions.  Should we treat "The Rightside Up" as a movie, and if so why?

Do we consider the platform?  Simply screening in a theater shouldn't have anything to do with whether we count a film as a film, though it's a big part of Oscar eligibility.  I've always treated TV movies as movies, especially after watching the Oscar and Emmy organizations squabble over eligibility rules, and the filmmakers themselves often not getting a say about the issue.  Especially in the streaming era, whether a film gets a theatrical release or not seems to be a matter of luck.     

Do we consider length?  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences says a feature length film has to be over forty minutes.  I'm more comfortable with using sixty as the bare minimum, but even then I make allowances for older films from back when they were counting the running times by physical film reels.  Anyway, "The Rightside Up" runs 128 minutes officially, which is definitely feature length.  

Do we consider whether the media in question is part of a series?  Here's where things get tricky.  There are some institutions that will treat miniseries, segments of miniseries, television seasons, and specific television episodes the same as feature films.  I generally don't agree with this, and prefer to treat multi-part serials and films as different.  However, the boundary between the two has gotten significantly fuzzier over the years, with many franchise films essentially operating like serials on a storytelling level, and television seasons often being produced and released like films.  And there have always been "package" films bundling television episodes for theatrical release, and re-edits of films into miniseries, like we've seen with "The Hateful Eight" and "Blackberry."  

So the answer here is, it depends.  And in the case of "The Rightside Up," I don't count it as its own feature because it wasn't meant to be watched in isolation, but as the final episode of the fifth season of "Stranger Things."  I know this argument could be applied to "Avengers: Endgame," but the MCU movies were conceived of and released as movies from the outset.  "Stranger Things," despite some advertising describing the last season as a collection of movies, has always been a Netflix series that we're expected to watch at home.

Hold on, we're not finished yet.  A few days after the finale, "One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5" showed up on Netflix.  This is the two-hour behind the scenes, making-of documentary that was put together to spotlight the efforts of the cast and crew of "Stranger Things."  This is essentially an extended version of the behind-the-scenes material that used to be included on home video releases, edited together into a full-length documentary.  Does this count as a movie in and of itself?  I'm inclined to say yes.  A documentary about a piece of media is still a documentary.    

There are a lot more gray areas to consider - Youtube video essays, video installations, museum pieces, stand-up comedy specials, pro-shots of stage shows and musicals, pro-shots of concerts, special installments of programs like "Top Gear," anthology segments, holiday variety specials, and celebrity profiles, like the recent ones for Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy.  I've counted all of these as films depending on the circumstances, if they happen to be long enough and have enough artistic intention behind them to stand as an individual narrative.  

Sometimes the impetus to call something a movie is simply that I want to recognize something for its quality, but it's hard to talk about it in cinematic terms if I don't treat it like a piece of cinema.  And if there's a director and a cinematographer and an editor involved, there's a good chance they're going to do what directors and cinematographers and editors do with any piece of media, whatever you want to call it.  And in the absence of anything better, sometimes that's a movie.

  

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