Blockbuster cinema and primetime television have been a fixture on German television for years. The private channels RTL and ProSieben in particular filled the Sunday evening with it – but what RTL has already announced will now also be carried out by the broadcaster competition in Munich: the finale of the Hollywood cinema in the program.
In the DWDL interview, ProSieben boss Daniel Rosemann named the falling number of major titles, triggered by the pandemic, as the main reason. The growing hunger of streaming services for blockbusters will also have its share. Daniel Rosemann announced increased in-house productions as a replacement.
Now the viewer doesn’t have to burst into tears immediately. The level of German television and streaming pro products has grown despite the continued and unnerving flood of crime. May the duckweed police “Wapo” in the first or the “Soko” instantware in the second, not to mention the living corpse “Balko” on RTL, also advise against such claims.
But television without groundbreaking, alluring, international cinema? If you look through the programs, you will find fewer and fewer attractive transmission slots. Among the main programs, only ZDF stands out with 10:15 p.m. on Monday.
The cinema film is also an essential part of television memory and television culture. Arte, the European culture channel (!), has not forgotten this and, in addition to primetime dates for the iconic film, has founded the online series “ArteKino Classics”: “La Strada”, “Carmen”, “Solo Sunny”, such treasures are available retrieval ready.
If those responsible for television continue like this, one day there will only be one cinema film in the medium: “Three Nuts for Cinderella”, the 1973 production by the Barrandov and Defa studios, which public television has adopted.
A dystopia, of course, but if you don’t raise your finger now, you’ll wake up tomorrow to a TV program that sells the “crime scene” as a blockbuster.
