Any Prospect of Serenity Sequel Quashed 246
Shadowruni writes "According to IGN.com, there will be no sequel to Serenity." Update: 10/07 01:31 GMT by Z : As enjerth pointed out below, this is not 100% accurate. Don't believe IGN, is the lesson. Here's the word from the man himself: "I turn my back for five minutes (that's how long it takes to admire my lovely back) and the interweb goes banoonoos! Isn't there any ACTUAL news to get wrong? Sorry about all this; it might be best if I just stay off the computer for a while ... The brain place is crowded with goods, ideas, sequels, spinoffs, animated versions, miniseries, radio dramas -- this is just the used goods. All the new wares are in there as well and it's deafening. Once I create a verse I never let go of it. And figuring out how much of my energy should be devoted to reawakening the projects you all love with the actors and characters I all love, and how much should be forging ahead and creating entirely new works (which you are contractually obligated to love) is exhausting."
aw man (Score:2, Funny)
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Also, Skin? "His father is the District Attorney!"
He also made it clear . . . (Score:4, Informative)
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Without giving spoilers for anyone who didn't see Serenity, I think there are several pretty clear reasons that it couldn't carry on, at least not with anything like the same atmosphere as the original Firefly series.
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Hey, speaking of no-more-Firefly-ever... I would really like Joss Whedon to reveal what 'Book's big secret was. The movie didn't reveal it, and we will never find out now...
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Fair enough... (Score:5, Funny)
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"Yeah... that went well..."
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"My dad owns a car dealership!"
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I don't want a sequel or a prequel. I want more stories from the time frame the first season was working from.
!!!
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Made a profit (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't forget the Stupid German Money [google.com] that makes a kind of profit even if the movie doesn't. I haven't checked the credits roll for any GmbH listings, but it is virtually certain that stupid german money was used in the production since it has been used in just about every other hollywood production in recent years (for example, all the Uwe B
Re:Made a profit (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, the movie theater has to pay out 90% or more of ticket sales to whoever they get the movie from for that first week, so where does the rest of the money go?
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I don't know what the missing numbers are, but I compared what boxofficemojo had to say about Equilibrium [boxofficemojo.com] which cost $20M and earned the studio close to $10M of profit.
It has been a few years since I listened to the director's commentary on the DVD, but I am pretty sure that he said that studio had been able to secure a total production budget of $30M, in large part because of the sale of foreign distribution rights.
Since actual producti
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If your $13M for rentals are accurate and DVD sales followed a similar trajectory it could be a good deal more by now but still far from the massive profitability studios expect before they green-light a sequel.
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If we assume the people who saw the first film out of curiosity don't come back and watch the second, then it could end up losing 10-20 million. The actors will probably want a payrise for a second film as well.
Here Is To a BSG Movie (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't really understand this impulse to turn things that are great in one medium into things in another.
I really love BSG, but I think a lot of its power comes from being a serial television program. Listen to Ron Moore's podcasts and you'll hear him remark on that. What exactly would be so great about a movie that can't be done in a 2- or 3-parter (which they actually do)?
And similarly, I didn't think Serenity was all that great. I mean, I enjoyed it, but not like the episodes. I have watched the ep
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The thing is, the Japanese have been doing this for decades with various anime series, and even in the US we see shows like Stargate: SG-1 continuing to keep enough people interested in it to make some money. Simply because it can get stale doesn't always mean tha
A sci-fi show that works.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here Is To a BSG Movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Star Trek before it, Battlestar grapples with these issues. Unlike Star Trek, it doesn't lecture you. It doesn't present you with easy answers. It doesn't tell you the answer that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Instead it brings up these issues within the context of a damn fine drama with all of the complex and messy interdependencies that we find in real life. The characters are complex and inconsistent and develop as they face these challenges. There are no clearly defined goodies and baddies. Even the Cylons have convoluted motivations. The characters (apart from Baltar) rarely fit simple pigeon-hole categories and we definitely don't have to endure annoying individuals who preach to us from a pedestal of high moral ground (though you may think one or two are a little self-righteous if you only watch a single episode).
Oh...one last thing...like Firefly it doesn't have people wearing silly masks pretending to be aliens.
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I agree that BSG touches on a lot of deep issues, and generally does it well. Last time we had a discussion about it around here (before the season two box set was out) I said that I thought the series was good, but suffered from always being so negative, with hardly any lucky breaks, or happy endings, or even hope. Someone suggested that this changed somewhat in the middle of season two, in the mid-season extended episode.
While I've now seen the box set and understand the point that reply was making, I s
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We can always toss in a cute kid with a robotic daggit. Hey, they can even stop the fleet at a space casino!
"I can't think of a single character who really has a happy "story so far" at this stage,"
For all intents and purposes, the entire human species save less than 1% has been wiped out of existence in a single cataclysmic attack. Nobody among those 15k should have a particularly happy life. Everybody has lost friends and loved ones, an
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They weren't meaningless to the Cylons. The Cylons had been enslaved by humans and as long as humans existed they ran the risk that they would, at some point, attempt to hunt them down and enslave or destroy them again. Given the contempt held by humans for Cylons, despite the fact that the Cylons were clearly intelligent and feeling enough to protest about their oppression, the Cylons were entirely justified in their fears.
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Not at all; those deaths were an essential part of the storyline. And of course, they did have meaning to the side causing them. The one I mentioned didn't really add anything. It didn't lead to any new angles on the storyline. It didn't trigger an essential subplot. It didn't fundamentally shift a balance of power in a way that would matter later in the series. It just happened, because.
As I've pointed out before, killin
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I loved the first two Spooks (They call it MI-5 here in the States) series enough to own them, but series three just eliminated virtually everyone I gave a damn about, and I've not even bothered to find out if they produced a series four, much less whether it will come out on DVD.
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Even so, I do think that it fit the drama nicely, and the reactions of some characters to the 'meaninglessness' of that death itself is nicely played. Meaningless death is, after all, one of the most frustrating things about situations like the one they portrayed. I would have been disappointed if they just used a red-shirt to deal with that aspect.
If you have the DVD set as you mentioned, I strongly recommend wa
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And we wonder why shows like Firefly got canned. Sheesh.
No we don't, pretty much every agrees it was mismanaged by Fox (plus, while great, it wasn't the most mainstream of shows). It wasn't because of people downloading it. In fact, quite the opposite; the movie got ma
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That may be true, or it may not. It doesn't really matter, because that's not what the studio execs looking at funding the next Firefly (or deciding whether to commission a fourth series of BSG) will see.
Right. So linking to illegal torrent
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My guess? WWII combat photographers. And my guess is that they didn't exactly plan on it, just a matter of not wanting to set up a decent tripod while getting shot at.
Galactica is a show about war. My guess is they're trying to make it look like one. If you want a constant camera angle, go out and watch a stage play. And don't be surprised when it doesn't have the same imapct
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for the best (Score:2)
Sequel would have been sweet... (Score:4, Interesting)
I must say, it was one of my favorite SciFi flicks to date. It totally surprised me, decent story, decent graphics. I recommended it to a lot of my friends. I described it loosely as if they made a movie about Han Solo. (rugged, funny thief...they almost dressed the same)
I was looking forward to another movie. I like the SciFiWestern combo that he pulled off.
Maybe I will just have to start watching Firefly.
Cheers,
TFG
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If you like the movie, the series will thrill you.
Re:Sequel would have been sweet... (Score:5, Insightful)
You will be sad when you finish it and realize that it's all over and there is nothing left to watch.
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Go out and buy Firefly, you will *not* be disappointed.
Bad TV show, great movie (Score:2)
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Also, all music with British guys singing sounds like a trip to the Man Hole where they all hold hands
Would been quite hard away (Score:2, Interesting)
One could feel in the movie that the series ended prematurely - with the highly compressed plot material found in the movie and the comic one could have easily filled a 2nd season, not to mention "paths not taken". But I must say Joss Whedon did the right thing - he gave the series closure. We know how the big plots resolved, we mourn the loss of loved ones and yet there is a somewhat brigh
Re:Would been quite hard away (Score:5, Interesting)
Book (Score:2)
So there you have it
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hell, even were they not new actually.
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Also, Whedon seems to have projects enough to keep him busy for another couple of years, and time has to be at least something of a factor. The buzz (and apparently
Good! (Score:2)
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*is in denial of post-1997 Star Wars productions*
Please, let my memory repression efforts work!
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*rk gestures in kimvette's general direction*
"There are only three Star Wars movies... and there wasn't a Holiday special either." :-)
Somewhat misinterpreted (Score:5, Informative)
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Lloyd: You know, you should tell your dad that 'serenity now' thing doesn't work. It just bottles up the anger, and eventually, you blow.
George: What do you know? You were in the nut house.
Lloyd: What do you think put me there?
George: I heard they found a family in your freezer.
Lloyd: Serenity now. Insanity later.
Old news (Score:2)
Time for a new quality SF TV series, I'd say.
NOT TRUE (Score:2)
No More Mrs. Reynolds.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a shame when shows like Firefly get axed when so much crap survives. But, I hate to admit it, I missed Firefly on TV and only got hip to it on DVD. What a shame.
I think it's a tribute to Joss that he got the movie made at all. And anyone who saw the film knew it was the end.
Re:No More Mrs. Reynolds.... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, you're gonna go to the special hell for bringing her up...
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Hmm... Doesn't seem so bad...
;-)
No loss (Score:2, Insightful)
Though as banal as I found it, it still amazes me at what gets cancelled, and what doesn't. At least Firefly had a plot....
LEX??? - how many bloody series of that have there been!? I've never met anyone who liked it. Did you? Please reply, and tell me why! Did I just not "get it"? Did I have to be on drugs or have been
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Lexx was just strange, from the one episode I ever saw of it. Of course, that turned out to be the last episode, and it was 3am, and I was a bit drunk and a lot tired.
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And for the record, I have never seen a single episode of any other show of Joss Whedon's creation. Nor do they really interest me enough to warrant
Serenity ain't ever coming back. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem with Serenity is that it's simply too sophisticated for your WWF fan types. The chinese expressions mixed in, six-gun slingers in space ships. It's just too much for a Nascar fan to cope with. I'm not saying the show is without its fans. I simply think that the average viewer can't quite get it, at least in the States, and that's too bad. It had a lot of originality and even though it had some rough edges, I think they would have really found their groove with another season.
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The thing that sucks about Firefly wasn't that it "could've been big," or that there "might have been something if given the time." What sucks is that the 1st season was really good, but FOX killed it for political reasons (internal politics). It'
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Your average Nascar fan loves shows like Lost, Deadwood, the Sopranos, which are much more complicated than Serenity.
The reason why the show failed, was because when people hear "cowboys in space"
Bigots suck (Score:3)
People are far more complex than your simplistic black and white worldview would suggest. Furthermore cars are a haven for nerdery wit
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Everything you listed makes it more accessable, IMO. Your average Nascar fan is a lot more likely to appreciate a good ol' gunfight than a lot of . I couldn't personally tell you why it failed, but I can tell you it wasn't because the show was too good for it's own good.
Damn and blast. (Score:4, Interesting)
Geez, the guy could suck the vampire franchise dry (sorry), you'd think he could soldier on without the likes of Wash and make it more/better/shinier. Even with the resolutions of the movie and all. One of my favorite quotes about anything creative is from Joss: "Restrictions are great because they make you more imaginative. They make you rethink things, they make you not-do the obvious." I'd say he set lots of restrictions on his existing story line and had no where to go but massively creative.
These characters were as salty / grounded / lofty / eye-twinkling / inventive as my favorite Heinlein characters. Even the trademark behaviors were just tweaked enough and were gently dashed often enough to keep you thinking "what's next?"
To quote Wash, this series told the rest of the scifi world "Here's something you can't do..."
We live in a world "Head of the Class" stays on the air for five seasons. Ya'd think they could keep this stuff rolling for more than one.
Quit while you're ahead... (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative being: milk it to death and leave them cursing the name "Lucas."
It's fucking heartbreaking (Score:5, Insightful)
They were competing with Star Wars cast, Star Trek cast, BSG cast and Stargate, and who knows who else, and every single one of those franchises had seen more airtime and more hours filmed than the entire Firefly universe, but those two were the most popular people by an outrageous margin. I would say an entire order of magnitutde.
Now consider how financially successful Star Treks and Star Warses have been and how hard to you have to slap FOX executives up one side and down the other for intentionally strangling this wonderful series so cruelly that the creator cannot even rationally consider attempting to bring it back to life?
Not as sure about that... (Score:2)
I was at a Serenity only convention last December, which was pretty cool as pretty much the whole cast was there (only Zoe missing) and even Josh showed up briefly (even a few guest apperances like the girl who played Ms. Reyonlds). The entire two or three days was spent on panels about Serenity, with some of the creative folk (like the graphics designer, very awesome talk) and many talks with different mixtures
Do the friggin Math... (Score:2)
Face it my darlings... the lot of you for the most part belong somewhere between 1 and 3 sigma out from the average intelligence and taste of the American public, and though that means there are millions of you, in the great scheme of things, you are VASTLY outnumbered by the unwashed and unthinking masses.
Not bad (unless you're concerned about about folks not teaching evolution or electing idiots for public office), but it's ki
Bah! (Score:2)
Zzzzzz (Score:2)
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Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
Many sites ran with similar stories, taking Joss Whedon's words out of context.
From Whedonesque http://whedonesque.com/comments/11513#144407 [whedonesque.com]:
[snip]
If you missed all the fun, at the weekend Joss responded to the latest Serenity sequel rumour and quite rightly knocked it on the head. Several sites picked up on what he said and took his remarks to mean that there would be never be a sequel to Serenity.
[snip]
And in this thread, Joss Whedon replies http://whedonesque.com/comments/11513#144407 [whedonesque.com] with the following:
[snip]
Isn't there any ACTUAL news to get wrong? Sorry about all this; it might be best if I just stay off the computer for a while. Or just glut the feed with wild conjecture. Hmm, let's see... I'm me, so... let's glut! Here are some ABSOLUTELY TRUE statements of factiness. Gentlemen, start your websites.
[snip]
Joss was putting to rest the rumor that he was working on Serenity 2, not saying that there will never be a Serenity 2.
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Here's more of Whedon's newest statements, but I pieced them together differently and got a much different result.
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I liked Firefly & Serenity a lot, but that was awesome!
Thanks.
DN
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Refresh my memory. Was Laura Ingalls or Nellie Olsen the hooker?
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Re:The do something else! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Damn. (Score:5, Funny)
The Serenity sequel is like a leaf on the wind. Leaf on the wi***CRUNCH***
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We did. And then Joss pulled the dirtiest storytelling trick he's ever pulled, and half of us shouted out how badly it was. That had a significantly depressing effect on ticket sales -- just like Superman Reurns, and just like Star Trek: Nemesis.
Combined with the demoralizing turnout for Star Trek: Nemesis, this makes me wonder whether the ratio of influence to noise by the Slashdot crowd is not overrated by some scary multiplier.
No, it's just that some times movie
Re:An opportunity how big? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you didn't think something like that was vintage Joss, you don't really know his style. It is part and parcel of Whedon to make you thoroughly love a character and strive fully alongside them for their hopes and desires, and then snatch it away from you with their death. These characters were risking everything for their dearly-held beliefs and it was only right and true that some of them paid with everything. When I was younger I wrote scifi stories with lots of lasers and danger, but for some reason I just couldn't cause much harm to my characters. The most that would happen was someone's arm would be hurt. Big fucking deal. As I grew into the thing I realized that all that passion means nothing without sacrifice. Joss kills off important characters to get your attention and make you believe that anything could happen. He's been doing it since the early days of Buffy -- he makes it very clear in some of the 1st season commentary that he wanted to start the series off by putting a character in the title sequence and killing them off in the second or third episode. He went ahead and killed the character, but he didn't have the money for the extra titles.
And he came back and went ahead and did it titles and all with Tara later on -- just to accentuate that the business of life in danger is a serious one.
I don't think that Wash's death was why Serenity didn't make that much money. I think it slept hard at the box office because it was under-publicized and under-promoted by the studios and given the kind of shit treatment that the series was given because they didn't fucking believe it could succeed. They couldn't give it the credit for being the great piece of work, and in today's box office environment if something doesn't literally explode out of the theatres in less than two weeks they yank it and send it to DVD. Serenity would have wiped the floor with every other piece of shit movie that came out that year if we weren't in the era of saltine-box multiplexes. It would have started quiet in the tiny distro it was originally given, and just kept on bringing people in, and bringin them in, and bringing them in. It's a gorram good movie, and I could watch it eight or ten times in a row (and I actually did) without getting sick of it.
You're pouty because a character got killed and the movie didn't go the way you wanted it to. But Joss knows very well that producing one bland "the gang's all here" sequel after another (like George Lucas started to do after Empire) will ultimately force you to churn out pablum oriented towards seven-year-olds that your adult audience can just barely stomach. And Whedon isn't quite ready to be a whore like George Lucas. So he takes risks with his characters, and allows their situations to evolve.
He's young yet. I don't think we've seen the last of what he's got to offer. The current film culture of Hollywood is so stagnant and predictable that I think it's highly at risk of being completely blown away by some new emerging dynamic. And I think Joss is part of that.
Re:An opportunity how big? (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree about writing with your own characters. Its very difficult to take risks with them, and in my (mostly unfinished) stories, I had to create red shirts so my stars would make it out all right. As I'm learning now, that doesn't make it fun.
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Well, there's more people than just Tara that dies on Buffy (even though that one hurt the most! I love Tara!). In the second season, Angel goes evil, kills Jenny Calendar, then goes to hell (though he does come back after a few episodes). In the third season, Angel, Wesley and Cordelia leaves for another show (where Cordelia dies a few years later). In the fourth season Oz goes bonkers and goes away (enter Tara), in the fifth season, Buffy and Dawn's mom dies (in the episode The Body, the best episode of B
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Oh dear. I take it you weren't paying attention then? They were husband and wife. Try watching the Firefly series.
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It had Buffy^WRiver the Reaver-Slayer!!!
Re:An opportunity how big? (Score:4, Insightful)
For all you know, he was planning on doing it at some point during the series, anyway. Now you've opened up the possibility of Zoe's character actually going to some dark places as a result that could be quite interesting, as well as making things complicated for the captain (because things never just go smooth.)
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