Would there be a market for this - condensed movies and TV seasons?

Cafe Society
1

I remember years ago the Godfather movies were edited and presented as a TV mini-series with the story in chronological order.

One of my favorite current shows is Friday Night Lights. Each season covers one high school football but this year and next year they only have 13 episodes to cover each story arc. So the storytelling is a bit jumpier and more episodic but it still moves right along.

This made me wonder. Would there be a market for something like Readers Digest Condensed Books, shortened re-edited versions of popular TV shows and movies. Still telling the story but trimming the extraneous stuff.

There are a few things that I think I would watch if there was a condensed version and I didn’t have to watch 22 hours of it.

2

There’s probably a lot of things that could handle, if not be improved, by judicious editing. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing where a studio is liable to pay some kid $20 and say, “Have at it.” You’re liable to end up with crap.

But yeah, I just watched Kill Bill 1 & 2 and my primary takeaway from them was that between the two, there’s probably a single decent film. I had the same impression watching the Star Wars prequels.

3

Why didn’t I think of that? They tell the story of the wedding 3 times and I disliked II so much that it, in retrospect, tainted my enjoyment of I.

4

I wish I could watch a condensed version for the last couple of seasons of Lost, so that I could catch up for the final season. I watched every episode for a couple of years, so I have a good introdution, but then I got frustrated and gave up on the show.

5

This sounds like a neat idea… The Reader’s Digest Condensed version of film.

6

Shows occasionally put out DVDs of the previous season so that new viewers can get up to speed. They did this for Battlestar Galactica, for instance, handing out the DVDs for free at science fiction conventions. So far, though, they’ve been promotional items. People who want to pay usually want the entire series – plus bonuses.

7

I saw Star Wars ep.1 in the ImaX and they had cut most of the crap and it was a far better movie. (Crap = all the dumb personal stuff that was soooooo bad).

8

For a long time now, Sony Pictures has been running a channel on YouTube featuring various five-minute “minisode” versions of various programs from their library.

On a different-but-similar tact, Fox once attempted a half-hour cutdown version of the hour-long Ally McBeal, titled simply Ally, in part due to the fact that half-hour shows sell better than hour-long shows in syndication. It didn’t last long enough to make it into syndication…or a full season, for that matter.

9

And adding rabbits.

The Phantom Edit

10

Yeah but I mean all three films down into one. It would probably be a 3-3.5 hour film, but much better for it.

11

The movie “Das Boot” was a 150 minute edit of a 6 hour German TV series. Both worked well…the movie as an action film, the tv series captured the sheer long hours of drudgery on patrol.