When TV Shows Made the Jump to the Big Screen

Hollywood has been mining television for movie ideas for decades, but turning a TV show into a theatrical hit has always been a gamble. Get it right, and you can end up with a billion-dollar franchise like Mission: Impossible or Star Trek. Get it wrong, rely on a cheap gimmick, or completely misunderstand what made the original show work, and you can have a very expensive disaster on your hands.

That gamble goes back much further than most people realize. Sixty years ago, television was still looked down upon by Hollywood, with the small screen often dismissed as low-brow entertainment. Movie studios weren’t exactly lining up to turn television’s biggest hits into prestige pictures, and for most TV shows, the formula was pretty simple: you had your original prime-time run, the show moved into syndication, and eventually faded into television history.

In 1966, however, two hugely popular television shows were canceled and immediately took an unusual trip from the living room to the movie theater. Instead of quietly disappearing into reruns, both properties were rushed onto the big screen, creating a strange little race between two of the biggest shows of the era.

The shows were The Munsters and The Flintstones, and Hollywood suddenly raced its hands.

Munster, Go Home! (June 15, 1966)

CBS canceled The Munsters in May 1966, but Universal wasn’t about to let the property disappear. The studio rushed Munster, Go Home! into theaters barely a month later, hoping to turn the show’s popularity into a quick theatrical payday.

For fans, there was at least one big attraction. The Munsters were finally getting the full Technicolor treatment on the big screen, giving the familiar television family a much bigger and brighter playground. Unfortunately for Universal, the novelty wasn’t enough to save the movie.

The film underperformed at the box office, and Universal abandoned plans for another theatrical television adaptation, Get Smart. One expensive lesson was apparently enough.

The Man Called Flintstone (August 3, 1966)

The Flintstones had a somewhat better experience. The final prime-time episode aired on April 1, 1966, and just four months later Fred, Wilma, Barney and the gang were back, this time in a feature-length theatrical adventure.

The Man Called Flintstone arrived in theaters on August 3, missing The Munsters’ big-screen debut by less than two months. The movie, however, had something its spooky competition didn’t: it was making history.

The film became the first animated television series to be turned into a full-length theatrical movie. Columbia Pictures also didn’t treat it like a simple television episode stretched to feature length, giving the movie bright animation, musical numbers and a spy spoof that sent Fred Flintstone into an adventure far removed from his usual life in Bedrock.

It also made money. The movie reportedly pulled in roughly $13 million domestically, enough for Columbia to bring it back to theaters three more times, in 1977, 1983 and 1988. Not bad for a cartoon that had just left television.

Of course, The Munsters and The Flintstones weren’t the first television shows to leap to the movies. That experiment had already begun more than a decade earlier with a much different kind of television favorite.

Dragnet (1954)

Jack Webb’s Dragnet holds the distinction of being the first television series adapted into a feature film. What makes the story particularly interesting is that Hollywood didn’t wait for the show to be canceled or even for its popularity to fade.

Warner Bros. released the movie in 1954 while Dragnet was still airing and at the height of its popularity. That seems completely normal today, when studios routinely turn successful television shows into movies, spin-offs and entire cinematic universes, but in 1954 it was still a pretty unusual idea.

Then there was the British contribution to the TV-to-movie experiment.

The Quatermass Experiment (1955)

Hammer Film Productions brought the BBC’s science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment to the big screen in 1955. Technically, the original television production was a completed six-part serial rather than a traditional television series, but it still deserves a place in the history of the crossover.

The story behind the original broadcast is almost as strange as the science fiction itself. The final four episodes were never properly archived, and one of the reasons was something that sounds like it came straight out of a monster movie: a live fly crawled across the camera lens during production. It is the kind of bizarre bit of television history that sounds completely made up until you discover that it actually happened.

By the 1980s, television and Hollywood had changed considerably. Networks began embracing nostalgia, reunion movies and updated versions of older shows, while television properties were no longer simply something that disappeared into syndication once their original runs ended.

Over the decades that followed, television intellectual property became one of Hollywood’s most reliable sources of movie material. Some adaptations became enormous franchises, while others became forgotten footnotes, proving that getting an established television property onto the big screen is only half the battle.

The difference isn’t always the size of the television audience, the budget, or even the popularity of the original property. More often than not, it comes down to the same thing it always has: the script.

A recognizable name can get people into the theater, but nostalgia can only carry a movie so far. You can have the biggest television franchise in the world, a massive budget and an audience that grew up loving the original show, but none of that can rescue a bad movie.

Hollywood learned that lesson in 1966, and it has been learning it ever since.

Tony M.

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