“The Simpsons” did it. So did “Sex and the City” — twice. And “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” are about to. Though we may be living in a golden age of television, the small screen isn’t a large enough canvas for some showrunners. IMDb.com is littered with beloved TV shows that made the leap to the big screen, some more valiantly than others. While it’s a tactic that has paid off for plenty of properties, for every hit Muppet or “Star Trek” movie, there’s also a “Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.”

This weekend you can add “Downton Abbey” to the ever-growing list of TV series that have tried to make their mark on the box office, as the creator Julian Fellowes has raised the stakes — and the costume budget — on his lavish series.

Picking up in 1927, just one year after the original series left off, the movie finds the Crawley household frantically preparing for a visit from King George and Queen Mary. They’re the kind of houseguests that only a show like “Downton Abbey” could get away with — and part of Fellowes’s and the producer Gareth Neame ’s plan to go bigger, which is just one of the lessons they learned about how to turn a series into a film.