Should every flawed Denzel Washington movie be reborn as a limited series? The question sounds absurd until one considers the streaming services’ appetite for new material. Get me Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria on the phone right now, and I will sell her an eight-episode reimagining of Glory, the 1989 Civil War drama featuring Washington and a grievously miscast Matthew Broderick. Surely Apple TV could squeeze a season or two out of Virtuosity, Washington’s 1995 sci-fi flick dismissed by Rolling Stone as “stillborn.”

One needn’t play make-believe to grasp the risks of this kind of “content” strategy. The Rainmaker (1997), Francis Ford Coppola’s middling adaptation of a John Grisham novel, recently found new life as a weekly drama on Peacock. I watched half of the first season before destroying it in these pages. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) was overpraised to begin with and certainly fared no better as a hapless 10-episode series on Fox in 2015. Far more uncommon is a big-screen-to-small-screen remake of the quality of Fargo, Noah Hawley’s memorable if uneven take on the Coen brothers’ 1996 masterpiece.