Television's 1996 Moment Against Theatrical Films

My Adventures with Superman premiered on Max in July and immediately became the thing people said about Superman on television. Sharp, fast, funny, the character finally getting room to breathe.

Supergirl's TV run ended in 2021 with genuine affection in its wake. Both shows are now being held up as proof that DC's streaming and network television has figured something out that the theatrical films keep missing.

The argument is structural. Television gets time — films get two hours and a marketing problem. Television builds character across seasons. Films build spectacle across budgets.

In 1996, Superman The Animated Series launched on Kids' WB. It spent four seasons defining how a character could move through serialized time and still land complex ideas. By the early 2000s, it seemed obvious that television had won something essential from film. Then came 2006, and Bryan Singer's Superman Returns — and suddenly the advantage inverted. Within a decade the theatrical slate had consolidated so much money and distribution that television's serialization advantage became invisible.

The current moment feels like that 1996 moment again — television winning because film is temporarily failing. DC's recent theatrical slate has been creatively unstable, while the streaming shows have good writers and no 180-minute constraint. But this isn't a format discovering its true nature. It's a cycle. Streaming has budget constraints that films don't, and films have theatrical presence that streaming chases endlessly.

Watch whether the success of My Adventures with Superman translates into studio investment in the theatrical slate, or whether DC's next film cycle proves the advantage was just about this moment's creative emptiness on the big screen. If the comics eventually follow the momentum—if Marvel and DC start greenighting theatrical films with the same serialization DNA that's working on Max—you'll know the format advantage was never the argument. The money was. It always is.