I actually think that 13-episode television series with a decent budget are far more entertaining and engaging than 2-hour films in many cases. Sure, for the epic stuff, you want a film. I can't imagine, say, the climactic sequence of The Winter Soldier or The Dark World working on the small screen. But there's a lot to be said for the ability to really develop stories and characters on the small screen.
In a way, individual comic book issues act as almost a storyboard for an individual episode of a TV series. They're usually contained stories that build towards a conclusion. This is why I was DELIGHTED to hear that Daredevil was gonna be a Netflix series. To me, that's the ideal format for Daredevil. With Spider-Man, I think the comic experience is this mix of small-scale stories and large-scale stories. But really, there's no reason why he couldn't stay on TV and skip the films.
I'll put it this way. The Game of Thrones TV series is one of the best on television in years. It really helps get the complexity of the books across, over the course of ten hours (although even so, they abbreviate aspects). Not everything in the show is as grandiose as in the books (e.g. Dany in the House of the Undying, several of the battle sequences, etc.). But the show is still shot like a ten hour movie, and it's AMAZING. Last year's battle at the Wall easily rivaled what I'd seen in blockbusters over the years, and in many ways was better because I actually cared about what was happening. Compare that to, say, Man of Steel, where I just...didn't give a damn about any of the characters. It was Superman punching Zod around the city and knocking over buildings. Who cares? On the other hand, when Grenn and his comrades are in the tunnel facing off against the giant...man, you feel the tension.
I think that a lot of the comic book stuff would work better if you had time to really build it, instead of just going for spectacle over content the way too many films do.
