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As the sun sets on the 2010s, two of the decade’s premiere franchises reach their culmination in a three-day span. After seventy episodes of dragons, zombies and incest, the characters of Game of Thrones will meet the formidable White Walkers in the Battle of Winterfell. The director of the episode boasts that it will be the largest battle ever televised, with a runtime commonly found in theaters. Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will assemble a massive cast of superheroes to finally face off against Thanos, a villain established when Kesha was relevant. Both the Battle of Winterfell and Avengers:Endgame will make conversation for their colossal body counts, but should also be remembered for their significant influence on their respective mediums transition into the streaming age.

These days, “superhero fatigue” think pieces are aplenty, but we tend to forget that this was already affecting multiplexes as early as the mid-2000s. Spider-Man 3, Superman Returns and X-Men: The Last Stand were evidence that the superhero formula was growing stale and the future looked like more of the same (plus a lot of pirates). Then 2008’s massive one-two punch of Iron-Man and The Dark Knight cemented the superhero movie as the generation’s storyteller and sent the genre down two diverging paths: gritty real world darkness and crossover serialization.

For the most part, the films of Marvel’s Phase One don’t require sequential viewing, though the groundwork is being laid for the franchises to come. The characters of these films finally collided in the massively successful first Avengers film, causing every studio executive to green-light a crossover event. Phase Two did a considerable bit more to make sure the audiences know these characters shop at the same Target. By this point, it’s expected that a McGuffin or Tom Hiddleston will appear across multiple movies. Beginning with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Phase Three expects you to know these characters and their motives. Previous viewing isn’t required, but you’re going to enjoy Endgame a lot more than whoever decides to take in their first Marvel movie. The Marvel Cinematic Universe plays like a cross-over episode from a bygone era of television.

As blockbuster action films and CGI family-friendly fare began to crowd the multiplexes, the “golden age of television” was able to give life to the type of stories no longer found in theaters. Twenty years ago, a show like Breaking Bad would be unthinkable television and would likely be condensed into a film, depriving the world of the Walt Jr. breakfast subplot. Shows like Lost, Mad Men and The Sopranos helped the genre continuously rewrite what was possible from a televised series. As these series continued to appease critics and attract new fans, the budgets began to balloon.

Suddenly a show about the zombie apocalypse could bring in the kind of money formerly reserved for summer tentpole releases. No other show has benefitted from this more than Game of Thrones. For eight years, the production and acting often exceeded anything atop the box office. The series has played like one long, seventy-hour movie and this last season especially feels like a film released in six weekly installments.

The decade will be remembered for making our films interconnected and bringing cinema to our televisions. This could not have happened without the cultural shift towards streaming services. Streaming services make a studio’s vault more accessible than ever. Viewers can now binge-watch a nine season television series or an entire cinematic universe at their leisure. This unlimited access allowed studios to raise their expectations of viewers. If everyone has access to the previous installments, they could write more complex storylines. Thus Hollywood gave us the “shared universe”, a template that differs from the traditional format of release-sequel-sequel. Character’s motives are now determined by the events in another movie and and stories can be crafted at multiple angles with installments released out of sequence.

On the successful side, Harry Potter and Star Wars added to their canon with stories that before wouldn’t have been told, while the failed Universal Monsters and struggling D.C. universe proved that it takes more than just an interwoven story for viewers to care. The successes have been more plentiful than the failures, so we can expect more films like a Fast and Furious crossover and fewer traditional franchises like Hunger Game and Twilight. We’re exiting an era where franchise films strived to be accessible as stand-alones and entering an age where it’s required to “catch up” before a day at the theater.

While streaming helped Hollywood become more episodic, it has strangled episodic television’s ability to permeate our nation’s culture. The insane amount of entertainment options available makes a show like Thrones or The Walking Dead hard to replicate. Popular as it seems, Game of Thrones will only pull a fraction of the M*A*S*H finale viewership, when America had the option of a few channels, not a few streaming services. Game of Thrones arrived just as studios were investing money into television and at a time when everybody still watched the same show on a weekly basis. Moving forward, we’re likely to see production budgets grow and series quality improve, but any show wishing to become culturally significant will find an easier route by adopting the binge-mode method of streaming.

Marvel and Game of Thrones defined the cultural zeitgeist of the 2010s, nuzzled alongside Calvin Harris and planking. That Endgame and Winterfell arrive on the same weekend caps a nice bow on a transitory decade. This decade is the point where movies and television traded off: films became chapters and television grew on an epic scale. The next evolution of streaming is that a franchise will no longer be restricted to one form of media. In November, Disney will add a televised series to the list of required viewing for anyone looking to “catch up” on the Star Wars franchise. The blueprint for the next decade is set.

As we say goodbye to a group of characters that have entertained us since the first Obama administration, it’s also time to say farewell to our old way of viewership. The line differentiating movies from television has been blurred to obscurity by streaming services. From now on, the only thing that will differentiate film from television is the room where you view it.