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Any Prospect of Serenity Sequel Quashed
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 06, 2006 06:39 PM
from the i-told-you-they-could-take-the-sky-from-me dept.
from the i-told-you-they-could-take-the-sky-from-me dept.
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."
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aw man (Score:2, Funny)
He also made it clear . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Fair enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
"Yeah... that went well..."
Made a profit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
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
Here Is To a BSG Movie (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Parent
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Go out and buy Firefly, you will *not* be disappointed.
Bad TV show, great movie (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Parent
Good! (Score:2)
Somewhat misinterpreted (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
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...
Parent
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
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.
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
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?
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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Here's more of Whedon's newest statements, but I pieced them together differently and got a much different result.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I liked Firefly & Serenity a lot, but that was awesome!
Thanks.
DN
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Refresh my memory. Was Laura Ingalls or Nellie Olsen the hooker?
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Re:The do something else! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Damn. (Score:5, Funny)
The Serenity sequel is like a leaf on the wind. Leaf on the wi***CRUNCH***
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)