ELI5: How come it takes years to make a 2 hour movie, but shows like Game of Thrones can release up to ten hours of movie-grade entertainment every year?

First, it doesn’t take years per se to make a movie. But there can be some delays - perhaps principal shooting only takes 2 months, but you have to wait 3 months for your lead actor to be available.

Shows like GoT get benefits over movies since the sets are all pre-built (past the 1st season) - actors have contracts stating they need to be available during a predictable time schedule if the show is renewed for the next season. GoT in particular also gets to benefit from the fact there are several plot lines that are independant - the Wall stuff, the Khalesi plot, the Westeros stuff, can all film in parallel. Not possible with a movie, where your lead actors can’t be in two places at once.

• multiple production teams for pre, post and shooting.

• multiple scriptwriters working on multiple episodes at once, television schedules being more demanding, less flexible to delays.

• a lot of the upfront preproduction and ‘selling’ of the show (aka the development hell) is out of the way before the pilot gets shot. Long running series don’t have to sell the production each season - just point to a rabid fanbase clamouring for more. Each movie has to churn through what could be years of this stuff. Production stuff.

• a movie could be 10 hours long, but noone would sit through it. But people will sit through 10 1 hr episodes no problem. So writing, timing and storytelling can be radically different.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.