Firefly Movie Gets The Green Light

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.

Comments

firefly

[panxerox]

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 !!".

Re:firefly

[eatenn]

"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.

Re:firefly

[teraph]

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.)

Re:firefly

[eatenn]

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.

Re:firefly

[mbourgon]

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.

Why do I get the feeling....

[ImTwoSlick]

... 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.

At lest they tried

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:At lest they tried

[KoopaTroopa]

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.

Re:New Series

[prockcore]

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.

won't be that great as movie

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Curse of the F's

[anagama]

Farscape

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

Converts after cancellation

[loftydog]

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.

Re:Converts after cancellation

[gmhowell]

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.

Cast announced

[__aaaehb3101]

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.

Maybe we'll get to see Jewel Saite naked...

[runlvl0]

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?

Re:Maybe we'll get to see Jewel Saite naked...

[TheLoneDanger]

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.)

Re:Curse of the F's

[Boing]

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

Re:Thanks to Firefly...

[droleary]

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!

Re:Josh Whedon the genius..

[Kaboom13]

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.

He is the director this time

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:why does firefly have such a fanbase?

[harlows_monkeys]

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.