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Firefly Movie Gets The Green Light

Posted by simoniker on from the big-screen-says-hello-to-reevers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to FireflyFans.net and Ain't It Cool News, Universal has greenlit production of 'Serenity,' the motion picture based on Joss Whedon's cancelled TV series 'Firefly.' Both sites point to an article from Variety that says the film will start production in June, and be ready for release in 2005." The informative Whedonesque weblog is also monitoring developments regarding this much-deserved resurrection.

35 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. firefly by panxerox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OIC firefly is good enough for a dvd set and good enough for a movie but not good enough for a series. Sometimes I wonder about the people making the decisions. Are they making a decision to not do a series because of business reasons or just well because they say so and those weenie viewers arent going to change our minds because they might get it in their heads that they matter. Yes I'm bitter. Its like they say "come here viewers come check out this great new series!" then they go "SUCKERS !! haha no show for you !!".

    --
    "It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
    1. Re:firefly by eatenn · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "OIC firefly is good enough for a dvd set and good enough for a movie but not good enough for a series."

      Financially speaking, I would say that Firefly may actually be better suited to movies than television. Whedon's shows are excellent... and also extremely expensive. Having to spend huge amounts of money for 22 episodes every year means that the corporate heads demand a pretty big payback pretty damn quick. Fox couldn't really afford for viewers to ease into the show (and God knows a Friday night time-slot didn't help). It's for similar reasons that Buffy left the WB and Angel was recently cancelled.

      As a motion picture though, they spend the big bucks once and reap the benefits for months in merchandise, rentals, etc. You don't get that kind of a pay-off with TV (at least not that quickly). I love Whedon's serial storytelling, but I'm excited to see how he adapts to the big screen.

      --
      "But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
    2. Re:firefly by teraph · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hopefully he's improved on his big-screen capabilities since the original Buffy and Alien 4. Ick.

      Well, it's hard to tell what the original scripts were like. A good script can become awful between the day it's bought and the day it's released in a theater.

      You have a half-dozen suits, directors, and editors to screw it up. (We're assuming here that the original script was good.)

      seeing how he much time he's taken in perfecting the series runs he's had, I have little doubt that Serenity will be spectacular.

      Yes. His TV shows are probably the better indicator of the quality of his writing, since that is where he has the most control. Everything he has done for film has had multiple hands, for good or ill. (And he's repeatedly stated his disappointment at both the Buffy movie and Alien Resurrection. He was once mis-identified as having written an episode of "Boy Meets World" and he expressed more pride in that incorrect credit than his writing of Resurrection.)

      It's possible that the Firefly film will suck, maybe because he fails to produce a good script, maybe because Universal selects someone else to direct, maybe because the producers demand bad changes.

      That's why he's better in TV. Head writers (who are almost always the producers) are nearly Gods with regard to how their scripts read and show up on screen. The network has some input, but much of it is Standards and Practices stuff (i.e., the censors).

      In film, the producers own the script and can do as they please. And then the director is in control the moment shooting starts (with input from the producers).

      Film writing is good money, but it's very little control. (Unless you make it yourself.)

    3. Re:firefly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Why spend money making quality television programming when you can throw more shit at us like American Idol, my fat obnoxious wedding, or whatever the hell else they come up with next week?

      Fox is so frustrating this year! I don't know how they can make some of the worst programming on TV (bullshit reality program of the week), and some of the best (Simpsons, Malcolm, Bernie Mac, That 70's Show, 24).

      Bah humbug.

    4. Re:firefly by eatenn · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Hopefully he's improved on his big-screen capabilities since the original Buffy and Alien 4. Ick.

      Yeck. Being president of the Joss Whedon Stalker Club, I may be a little biased, but I've read Whedon's draft of the Buffy movie (which he didn't direct), and the version that actually made it to the theatres... Whedon's draft is much better. Apparently Donald Sutherland insisted on writing his own dialog, the studio wanted it to be more of a teen comedy, and the director didn't understand the material. It's the nature of the business that scripts get fucked with by a series of producers, directors, and studio heads who are constantly looking for ways to fit a monkey into the story somehow.

      Whedon has also stated that no one hates Alien 4 more than he does. He had other people dictating what he was supposed to write.

      I've also had the experience in film school having one of my scripts approved for production and then butchered beyond all recognition. It ain't fun.

      --
      "But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
    5. Re:firefly by mbourgon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      All of this is actually touched on in the box set.

      Touched on isn't the word I'd use. It's heavily talked about during both Serenity (the Pilot) & The Train Job. Joss certainly doesn't hold back during the commentary. Never has the "commentary may not reflect the studio's views" warning been more apt.

      --
      "Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
  2. Can't Wait by darth_MALL · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Does anyone else see the similarity to that lame-ass 80's cartoon BraveStarr? Alright I loved it.

  3. Why do I get the feeling.... by ImTwoSlick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... that they like to cancel great TV shows, just to make a few extra bucks on a movie they know people have been dying to see.

  4. At lest they tried by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fox is one of the few networks that at least gives shows like these a shot. Think about it.

    1. Re:At lest they tried by KoopaTroopa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Y'know, that same thought has occurred to me before. I don't watch much TV, and I find myself buying/borrowing/renting DVD sets of the few shows that I actually watch. Turns out a great number of them either air(ed) on Fox or are Fox properties. They greenlight stuff that I like! It just burns me up that they preempt these shows to death and subsequently cancel them after they give them a chance.

      Perhaps the right hand doesn't agree with the left.

      --
      Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
  5. Re:Curse of the F's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Fastlane - Cancelled.

    HEY, Waitaminnit!!!

  6. Re:New Series by prockcore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would rather have the series returen

    Joss Whedon should call up USA. With Monk and Dead Zone it's obvious that USA isn't afraid to back a strange-yet-brilliant show.

    Or maybe FX (Nip Tuck, The Shield) or Bravo (Keen Eddie, Touching Evil).

    Cable is really the only place you can find good shows that don't dumb down to the common denominator.

    Fox is just stupid. How much money are they making from the Firefly dvds and Family Guy dvds? Compare that with how much money you would expect an any reality TV DVD to make.

    In a couple of years, fox is going to have to reach all the way back to In Living Colour in order to make DVD sales... because no one wants to buy anything that they currently air.

  7. won't be that great as movie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The movie won't be able to depend on knowledge of the TV series because there isn't a large enough fanbase. That means they will have to condense a lot into 90 minutes. Firefly is so good because of the time allowed to develop the characters in a TV series. So while non-fans may have some visual effect treats and see SOME of the flavor of the show, it won't be able to touch the series; and fans will be disappointed because the movie will have to be introductory and won't pick up where the show left off.

    TV show movies that do well are those that ran a long time and therefor have a large fanbase.

    This will just be another scifi movie.

    1. Re:won't be that great as movie by eatenn · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Joss Whedon has turned the town of Sunnydale into a giant musical (Once More, With Feeling), he has taken away the ability for his characters to talk (Hush), and recently he has turned a centuries old vampire-with-a-soul into a felt puppet (Smile Time)... all of it pure comedy.

      I think the guy deserves the benefit of the doubt ;)

      --
      "But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
  8. Re:Curse of the F's by anagama · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Farscape

    I don't what network it was on (DVD watcher myself), but it is also an unfair F cut.

    --
    What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
  9. Converts after cancellation by loftydog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fox did everything it could to kill this show.

    First, they aired the episodes in a random order so there was no continuity

    Second, they changed the time it was aired, then changed the day, all within a span of three weeks

    Third, and most insulting, is that they assumed the demographic watching Firefly would switch to watching Fastlane, as some of the numbers from Nielson were similar

    Sadly, I've had more people become "fans" of the show after the cancellattion by loaning them the DVDs, with most of them not being scifi fans.

    1. Re:Converts after cancellation by gmhowell · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If Fox didn't know what to do with it, they shouldn't have screwed around with it. They should have shown the pilot as the pilot. They should have shown the episodes in order, etc.

      No, Fox *thought* they knew what to do, but obviously didn't.

      --
      Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  10. Cast announced by __aaaehb3101 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I don't see Ron Glass("the shepard") listed in the returning cast list. I wonder what is going on there? While not my favourite character, the shepard seems to have a more shady past than any.
    from the press release:
    ...The Serenity cast will include such returning "Firefly" cast members as Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm 'Mal' Reynolds, Gina Torres as Zoe Warren, Morena Baccarin as Inara Serra, Jewel Staite as Kaylee Frye, Adam Baldwin as Jayne Cobb, Sean Maher as Dr. Simon Tam and Summer Glau as River Tam.
  11. Maybe we'll get to see Jewel Saite naked... by runlvl0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I recently picked up the box set to check out the series, and this is great news...I was surprised how good the series was and perplexed as to why such a show was canceled.

    Because you didn't watch it on TV?

    --

    Carthago delenda est!
    1. Re:Maybe we'll get to see Jewel Saite naked... by TheLoneDanger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hopefully some mods will see the parent post. Fox didn't make it easy to watch Firefly on TV even for diehard Whedon or sci-fi fans because they showed the episodes out of order and kept switching its timeslot.

      In addition to this, I believe that the Nielsen system is broken. I believe that there are 5000 Nielsen households, and that these are supposed to roughly correlate to population distribution. But over and over we see shows that get cancelled even with large numbers of fans complaining, along with some shows that no one cares enough to complain about. Firefly fans did crazy stuff like take out full page ads thanking the studios and each advertiser for the show by name, and mailing stuff to sponsors and studio heads.

      Maybe we need more geeks to try to be Nielsen viewers? How does a family become a Nielsen household? (I'm Canadian so I can't do it anyway, but I hate watching shows I like get cancelled.)

      --

      "But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
  12. Re:Curse of the F's by Boing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Never saw it myself, but a lot of people would be mad that you forgot "Freaks and Geeks".

  13. Re:Curse of the F's by ajs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, to be fair, Firefly got half a season where the other two you mentioned went quite a lot longer. Family Guy got 3 seasons and Futurama a full 5! Getting pulled off the air after 5 seasons may be dissapointing to fans, but it's a good run by any realistic measure, and most shows don't go 3 seasons for that matter.

  14. Re:Thanks to Firefly... by droleary · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You misspelled 'mispronounce'... ;)

    Nah, the real typo was in "Mandarin Chinese". It should have been either "Space Mandarin" or "Future Chinese". To pretend we know how a language will be pronounced in 500 years is silly. Every heard Old English? Woof!

  15. Re:Probably offtopic, but... by NOLAChief · · Score: 2, Insightful
    There are many TV shows that don't translate well to the big screen because there's nothing left to tell. The core story of B5 ran it's course through the TV series. JMS got to tell the story he wanted to tell and we enjoyed it. Everyone's happy.

    As far as Firefly goes, it was killed in it's infancy, making nobody but the Fox suit lobbying for yet another inane reality show happy. Like JMS, there is a story Joss Whedon desperately wants to tell (though I seriously doubt he had 5 seasons more or less planned in advance). This movie is an attempt at breathing life back into the project so that he might get a chance to finish telling his story.

  16. Re:Josh Whedon the genius.. by Kaboom13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Survivor and the other realisty shows have suceeded mainly because they are dirt cheap to make. Survivor deserves some credit for being a halfway original idea (I've never watched an entire episode) so when it got big they made money hand over fist, thus the spawn of reality shows. I've never met a person who actually claimed to be a big fan, the pople who do watch them seem to just because there's a lack of anything better. Tv is all about money, not viewer satisfaction.

  17. He is the director this time by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Buffy movie has a very different feel than the series, which Joss claim is because the director had a different vision than Joss did.

    Alien 4 feel a lot more like City of Lost Children than an Alien movie. Again, the directors influence. One other write with a Usenet presense (I believe it wa Peter A. David) claimed he got into Buffy by wathing Alien 4, and seeing a good script being burried behind a misunderstood direction, and got currios about the writer.

    Titan AE was actually pretty good, but I don't know how much of Joss writting was involved. There was a couple of places that were clearly Joss though. The intelligent guard, and Planet Bob were Joss trademark humor.

    This time Joss gets to both write and direct the movie according to the Variety article, so we will be able to judge directly his abilities as a movie maker. From the few Buffy episodes he has written and directed himself (like Hush and Once More With Feeling), I believe we are in for a treat.

  18. Re:I'm troll and I'm proud. by Justabit · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Do you remember the movie that had the actor from 'John Boy' as the young inpresionable backwater farm planet take the familys sentient spaceship out to find a group of heros to defend his comunity. It had 5 white clone aliens, an Amazon busty princess, the guy from UNCLE as a black spy type, and a caracter called 'Spacecowboy'. The whole western in space theme really worked for that film. Come to think of it Star Wars is a western space melding as well.

    --
    "Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
  19. Re:why does firefly have such a fanbase? by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wheadon seems to not understand the enormous amounts of energy required for space travel, and moving livestock around is just not going to pay for it

    You have absolutely no clue whatsoever how much energy would be required for such space travel, because in real life there is neither any theory nor any experiment that covers faster-than-light travel. Once your suspension of disbelief goes so far as to allow FTL, trying to do things like energy calculations is just silly.

    You also have no clue at all what the value of livestock might be in an interstellar economy. If that livestock is key to allowing a colony to thrive on a planet, it could be very valuable.

    And ancient projectile weapons? I'm sorry, my suspension of disbelief only goes so far

    So you have no problem with FTL, which is something that is, as far as we know currently, impossible, but having some people using projectile weapons while others use more sophisticated weapons bothers you? Even though if you just look around on Earth, you can find societies that still use rocks and pointed sticks?

    This is one of the things that Firefly got right that most other science fiction gets wrong--technology is too uniform in most science fiction. Based on a couple thousand years of Earth history, it is far more believable to have a wide range of technology.

  20. Re:New Series by Ray+Radlein · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, but Monk and Dead Zone and Nip/Tuck and The Shield and the like absolutely have to have significantly lower per-episode costs than Firefly had.

    Cable markets have even more trouble supporting effects-heavy science fiction than networks do. The only reason Farscape and Lexx ever worked financially for the Sci-Fi Channel were because they were filmed abroad (Australia and Canada, respectively) and also sold into numerous foreign markets, both of which helped lower the network's outlay.

    If Firefly were to wind up on USA Network, you could look forward to a lot of episodes set planetside on dusty frontier worlds (like "Jaynestown"), or set entirely inside Serenity, with few guest stars and few exterior FX shots (like "Objects in Space").


    Which isn't to say that Joss couldn't make it work despite all that, of course. He is, after all, Joss.

  21. Re:New Series by B3ryllium · · Score: 2, Insightful

    GE also owns NBC ... I think Firefly would make an excellent lead-in to ER, because of the story arcs involved in each show. Thursday nights ... the writer's plaything.

    We will rule over all this land, and we will call it ... this land!

  22. Re:why does firefly have such a fanbase? by Ray+Radlein · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They use projectile weapons because projectile weapons are low maintenance items compared to Electronuclear Kill-O-Zap Rifles, which probably seize up the first time they get near a bit of dust. That's the way things always work.

  23. Re:New Series by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > "Auds"? Obviously this is short for "audience," but still. Let's move on.
    ...
    > Ah yes, a "space oater." I'm fond of those.
    ...
    > "Whedon's shingle," uh huh...

    o/~Normal talk makes producers walk/You might as well speak Greek/Unless you learn to talk that Variety Speak (Baba-doo-ba, baba-doo-ba...)o/~

    Chris Mattern

  24. They didn't cancel it TO make a movie... by AzrealAO · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fox cancelled the show.

    Joss Whedon tried to shop the show around to other networks trying to get it picked up, but was unsuccessful.

    Decided to try and get a movie made, managed to get that green lighted.

    Best hope is that the movie will be successful enough to give him more ammunition trying to get the show picked up for a second season.

  25. Re:New Series by ShinyBrowncoat · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Can someone point out what was especially good about it?
    Although fans have all sorts of reasons for loving this show, I think it boils down to excellent, convention-defying writing, a great cast with amazing chemistry from the first scene, and seamless transitions between entertaining action, riveting drama, and ROTFLMAO humor/comedy all within one 45 minute episode. Check out episodes like 'Our Mrs. Reynolds' our 'Out of Gas' for the best examples of this. Oh, and downloads of the TV eps are available here, but only for a short while longer, so get them while you can!
    --

    "They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
  26. Re:Kaylee... by goodEvans · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah. Morena Baccarin is classicly beautiful, so much so that even my wife can't take her eyes off her, but Kaylee just has that certain something...

    Maybe it was the smudge of dirt on her nose, I just don't know.