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Originally Posted by Kadath
Also, and I'm speaking directly from my ass here, but you know how movies from the theater are formatted to fit your TV screen? TV movies might be filmed in standard tv format, not 16:9 aspect ratio or whatever. But I'm sure someone more knowledgeable* than I could correct me on that.
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Most theatrical movies and made for tv movies are filmed on the same film stock, which is 4:3 or 1.33:1. With a tv movie, they typically use the whole frame. When filming for theatrical release, they can do one of two things. First, they can frame the shot so that there's irrelevant information at the top and bottom of the frame that's not intended to be seen by the audience. The director has a special guide he looks through to see what will and won't be seen by an audience in the theater, and put the important stuff into the safe area. A metal screen is then used in the camera to block out the top and bottom portions of the picture to create the correct 1.85:1 (for mos US pictures) or 1.66:1 (for most European pictures).
Have you ever been in a movie theater and seen boom mikes at the top of the frame, and wondered how the movie got to the theater that way without it being noticed? It's not the fault of the filmmakers; the projectionist has framed the picture wrong, and that part of the screen isn't supposed to be visible.
Movies filmed this way have to be reformatted in pan n scan for tv, with the edges of the safe area chopped off and the picture panning back and forth to follow the action.
The second method is to frame the shot so that the whole frame, top to bottom, is used, but the most important info is in the middle portion. In theaters, the top and bottom portions are still screened out, but because this information isn't important, nothing is lost. For tv, the top and bottom screens are removed, and the whole frame is shown--this is called open matte. Stanley Kubrick did many of his movies this way so that they wouldn't be butchered by pan n scan the way 2001 was.
If you see something broadcast in HD, it's a different story. Those are recorded using a special high definition digital camera, so there's no film source to be manipulated in the first place. Star Wars episodes 2 and 3, and several current tv shows are filmed this way.
One further reason why tv movies aren't broadcast is the cost of advertising. A big portion of the cost of theatrical moviemaking is advertising, which can be in the tens of millions of dollars, more than A & E has to spend.