Serenity Pushed Back to September

iontyre writes "According to Joss Whedon and reported at fireflymovie.com the much anticipated feature film adaptation of the superb but canceled tv show Firefly has been delayed till September from its original April release to supposedly avoid too much genre competition."

Comments

oh oh

[fulana_lover]

Man how bad does your movie have to suck if you are scared of the next Star Wars?

Re:In Movie Speak

[Anonymous Coward]

Pushing a movie back due to competition means your movie sucks.

As Joss said in TFA (emph mine)

This isn't about a lack of confidence in the film -- in fact, they told me this before they even saw it. And now they have seen it, and unless they're way better liars than I'm used to, they dug it. Actually, they dug it pretty large, which is a good sign since there's not a single finished effect in the film. There's no reworking the end, no reshoots, no "does it have to be in space?". It's just a marketing issue.

Re:In Movie Speak

[Khomar]

No, it just means that they don't want to put what is currently a cult favorite against the marketing giant known as Star Wars. Remember, most people have never heard of Firefly, and when put against a major film release, it could easily be lost in the marketing blitz (although I personnally do not care if I ever see Episode III).

It is much better to give Serenity the best chance of exposure. People who never watched the show will not realize how truly great it is. Most people would probably rather watch Star Wars being a known commodity than take a chance with something new and strange.

Re:Logic failure

[phoebusQ]

Your logic only follows if the measure of a piece of art is entirely based on its popularity during a specified timeframe. There are plenty of examples, across mediums and throughout history, in which works have been ill-received initially, or by certain groups of people. This does not indicated that they are any "less good". Additionally, the unique nature of Firefly probably guarantees that it will take time to be accepted by the general populace. As geeks, we tend to thing of the majority as fairly ill-opinionated and ill-informed (and that's putting our general consensus nicely). Given time and exposure, I guarantee that a lot of people will come to like Firefly and its derivative works. Just look at all the posts by people saying "My friends made me watch it. At first I thought it was kinda dumb/weird/not what I'm into, but after becoming addicted I can say this is a great show!". So I think it's a little premature to say the show isn't superb. It just didn't generate superb Nielsens. DISCLAIMER: I think Firefly is f'ing awesome.

A conspiracy theorist tells why Fox killed Firefly

[software_trainer]

Hank Parnell of the Texas Mercury asserts that Fox deliberately killed Firefly for political reasons. Personally, I don't think Fox's politics had anything to do with it, but his article is entertaining. The complete essay is on fireflyfans.net. I copied the most inflammatory, er, interesting, excerpts below:

They wanted to kill this show. I believe that, as surely as I do that the sun rises in the east...

The conscious patterning of the Firefly milieu on the Confederate defeat that Whedon publicly stated was the case may have not set very well in the Yankee-dominated halls of Political Correctness that rules modern America, be they "liberal" or "conservative" ("neoconservative"; again, the two are virtually indistinguishable). Firefly was an unabashed post-Civil War space Western where the losers were the good guys; and everything about the series echoed that, from the desert settings of the frontier moons and planets, the costumes, the music, even the characters' patterns of speech. We knew who these people really were. They had no slavery to fight for, only the right of self-governance...

Firefly, in its way, was, in this post 9-11 climate, almost downright seditious. The Alliance enforcers--the "bad guys"--were called "Feds." The attempt to unite and homogenize people was seen, by Firefly, as not a "good" thing; and yet it is the undeniable Zeitgeist of the modern age and behind every bit of mischief and misadventure in the world today...

Nor do most people agree with Captain Reynolds' words (as quoted by Reverend Book in the episode "War Stories"), "The government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."...Do not think that Firefly was not drawing allusions and parallels to our own society and its attendant beliefs, or that this implicit criticism went unnoticed by the powers-that-be...

And Firefly made the case, through Reynolds, as persuasively as it has ever been made in American fiction, print, TV, film or otherwise, in my opinion, for the ultimate superiority of the rule of honor over the rule of law...For you see, the rule of honor demands what law must defer: individual responsibility, personal culpability, what is fair and what is just, of every man (and woman) who lives by it...And it is the greatest offense, the greatest affront, that Firefly could give to our vaunted modern age, and why, in my opinion, Fox never gave the show any kind of a chance.