I watched 429 movies last year, just for fun. That’s not even my best single year — 713 in 2022. I promise I have both a personal and professional life. I just really like movies.
And like any fine, upstanding cinephile, I checked out The Mandalorian & Grogu this past weekend at my local independent cinema (check out The Sun Theatre in Yarravile) and while I had a genuinely good time whiling away two hours of a cool autumn Saturday, I left thinking something I almost never think: that would have been better as a season of TV.
I don’t usually say that. I usually say the opposite.
Streaming has spent the better part of a decade taking what should be tight, propulsive hundred-minute films and stretching them into three-hundred-minute slogs, individual episodes existing only to service the next one, never bothering to arrive anywhere on their own terms. The bloat is real and it is boring and I am tired of it.
But The Mandalorian & Grogu pulled off the reverse. It’s essentially three episodes of television with twenty percent more budget and a theatrical release date. And sitting there in the dark watching it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Disney had made a deliberate choice to blur the line between platforms. And even if the Star Wars IP is powerful enough to survive it (Baby Yoda transcends format), most things don’t.
Platform Is Not Just Distribution
Here’s the counterpoint I kept returning to, driving home from the Sun Theatre with my popcorn regrets: The Pitt.
If you haven’t watched it, fix that immediately. It’s a medical drama set entirely across a single fifteen-hour emergency department shift, told in real time across fifteen episodes, with one hour of story per episode of television. It is one of the most formally precise pieces of storytelling in recent memory, and it works entirely because of the platform it lives on. The episodic structure isn’t a constraint. It’s the entire creative engine. Each hour ends with just enough resolution to feel earned and just enough tension to demand the next. The format and the story are inseparable.
Could it work as a film? Absolutely not. A two-hour cut would gut everything that makes it remarkable. A streaming dump of all fifteen episodes at once would destroy the rhythm that makes each hour land, not to mention the ability to discuss with friends and coworkers about that one scene (you know the one.). The Pitt is what it is because television, real episodic television with the breathing room to develop character across time, is exactly the right home for it.
This is what respecting your platform looks like. And it is increasingly rare.
TV and film exist as distinct formats for a reason. Hitchcock more or less invented the concept of scheduled showtimes with Psycho because movies demand your full attention from the first frame. They represent a complete contract with the audience, beginning to end, no exits. Television was built on the opposite premise. Episodic, accessible, something you could drop into at any point and broadly follow. They are different creative relationships with the audience, built on different expectations, different commitments, different rewards.
Hollywood spent decades understanding that distinction. Streaming spent a decade dismantling it. And The Mandalorian & Grogu, for all its charm, is a symptom of an industry that has stopped asking what a story needs and started asking what the release calendar demands.
Which got me thinking about brands. Because brands are making exactly the same mistake, with none of the safety net.
The Great Flattening
The dramatic rise of digital advertising over the past thirty years has produced what I’d call the great flattening of creative output. Integrated marketing communications, always a legitimate discipline, quietly became shorthand for the same creative rolling out across every touchpoint with almost no consideration for what actually made sense on each platform.
Banner ads crammed with oddly cropped imagery. TV spots repurposed wholesale for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok without anyone stopping to ask whether the format, the audience, or the context made any sense. The cheapest possible pathway, dressed up as efficiency.
Nobody really noticed because reach numbers stayed up and the deck still looked fine. But something was quietly being lost. The same thing The Mandalorian lost when it traded its natural home for a cinema screen: the sense that this thing belongs here, was made for here, understands where it is.
The Channel Is the Creative Brief
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the difference between platforms isn’t a production constraint to be minimised. It’s a creative opportunity being left on the table every single time someone exports the same thirty-second cut across six different channels and calls it a campaign.
TikTok is not Instagram. Instagram is not LinkedIn. A pre-roll on YouTube is not a television commercial. These platforms have distinct audiences, distinct behaviours, distinct relationships between the viewer and the content. The brands that understand this aren’t just performing better on individual channels, they’re building something the flattened approach can never buy. Genuine relevance. The sense that this brand actually belongs here, in this space, speaking to me specifically.
The Pitt understood this instinctively. Every creative decision, from the real-time structure, episode length, and the deliberate absence of a binge option at launch, was made in service of what television uniquely allows. The result is something that couldn’t exist anywhere else, which is exactly why it cuts through everything else.
The Mandalorian & Grogu will do fine at the box office. Star Wars has enough accumulated cultural capital to absorb a format identity crisis. But the film is a lesser thing for it, diminished by the blurring of what it is and where it belongs. You can feel it watching it. Something slightly off, like a song played in the wrong key.
Brands don’t have that accumulated capital to spend. They don’t have Baby Yoda. Every flattened campaign, every repurposed asset, every one-size-fits-all creative decision is a small withdrawal from an account that may be thinner than they think.
The Pitt couldn’t be a movie. The Mandalorian & Grogu shouldn’t have been one. And your brand campaign that started life as a TV spot has no business on TikTok without a complete rethink.
The channel is the creative brief. This is the way. Start treating it like one.
