Despite both being based on screens, cinema and TV don’t have a lot in common. Movies are usually high-budget, with extravagant special effects, high production values and Micheal Bay directing said movie, and TV is lower-budget, with either an episodic or a serial format. Despite that, several TV shows have made their way to the big-screen, and far less commonly, vice versa. This editorial takes a a look at ‘vice versa’, listing the top five movies that should be making their way from the big screen to the silver screen:

5: Lord of the Rings

This could go two ways. You could make a serial, adapting the trilogy into fifteen-odd parts (maybe even delving into The Hobbit to bulk the series up a little), or do the less obvious option and delve into Tolkien’s mountains of side lore and make a spin-off set in Middle Earth and in the same universe as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but with a brand new set of characters. You could even do a Lord of the Rings: The Next Generation with ancestors of the original characters. Heck, you could even include robots and the USS Enter- no, scrap that. Not a good idea.

4: Star Trek

Let me finish before you start reminding me that there’s been six Star Trek TV shows already, and that the Trek franchise started on TV anyway. Both those things are true, but as you might have guessed from the above picture, I’m talking about the JJ Abrams movie(s). With a young, fresh-faced cast and Abrams at the helm (and JJ Abrams is notoriously TV show-commission-happy), adapting the Abrams universe onto TV could produce a really, really great TV show for the iPad generation. It’s a concept that’s been suggested already, but I can’t help wondering why they haven’t commissioned it yet – oh, Star Trek 2.

3: James Bond 

You could argue that the Bond series is large-scale, higher-budget, TV-for-the-big-screen, so it seems a perfect fit for TV. Every movie in the series (bar Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace – and while Royale was good, Solace was a pile of overblown mess, so the two-part movie idea clearly doesn’t fit Bond) is self-contained and includes its own villains (except the ones with Blofield in) – just like a TV show (well, most TV shows anyway). The comparisons seem a bit forced, but (including the not-quite-yet-released Skyfall) the series is even made up of 23 movies, just like an average American TV season (you wanted forced?).

2: Harry Potter

I like to think that I’m pretty unbiased when it comes to writing, but if you know me personally, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of the Harry Potter franchise, having grown up with the movies and the later books, and that I’ll go out of my way to give the series plaudits. But even writing this from a non-biased view, it seems that Harry Potter was made for TV. Not only is there a huge amount of content to adapt (the eight movies total twenty hours of film), JK Rowling, like Tolkien, has written tons of extra Potter content, from Pottermore to The Tales of Beedle the Bard. And since a lot of the stuff that happens during the school year in the movies isn’t shown, you could squeeze even more footage out by simply making up stories to fit in between the stories that are told in the books. Harry Potter very nearly made it to number 1, but it was beaten out by a franchise that seems to fit TV even better than film…

1: Spider-Man

And topping the list is a figure familiar to TV, Spider-Man. There’s been three Spider-Man films, one good, one excellent and one that people don’t like to talk about (no prizes for guessing which one is which), but the best and most celebrated movie (Spider-Man 2) was the movie that felt most like TV with the most drama and the smallest scale, had large quantities of soap opera (good soap opera, mind) running through its red and blue veins. And that proved that Spider-Man could work better on TV that it’s ever done on film. I’m not talking about an animated show (there’s been way too many of those), I’m talking about a proper live-action show that could surpass the very pinnacle of Spider-Man 2 (cough, train fight, cough). The Spidey-verse lends itself perfectly to a live-action, high-action soap opera, so much that you have to wonder why we aren’t watching a Spider-Man TV show every Saturday night anyway.

That concludes this list. This list was based on the collective opinion of the UTF staffers, but if you have your own suggestions for films that should be making their way to the silver screen, sound off in the comments below, and if we get enough suggestions, there might just be a part two.