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Babylon 5 Theatrical Movie Falls Through
duck2ducks writes "According to a post from JMS, the Babylon 5 feature film has been cancelled. This is sad news indeed for all fans of one of the best sci-fi stories ever produced." From Straczynski's post: "In the end, however, the deal could be put together, and it did not
look as if that was going to change at any point in the foreseeable
future. So the option has reverted, and to all intents and purposes,
the project has dead ended."
Christopher Franke - Babylon 5 soundtrack - Sleeping in Light - End Titles
This is sad news indeed for all fans of one of the best sci-fi stories ever produced.
I really don't see what this has to do with Firefly.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
It's the Enterprise Effect.
1. Enterprise gets very low ratings.
2. Enterprise is sci-fi.
3. B5 is sci-fi.
4. B5 will get low ratings (attendance)
Behold, I have become Rich Berman, the destroyer of sci-fi.
A friend of mine has loaned me B5 on DVD, and I keep at it, but I'm not entirely sure why.
The most interesting thing about it is the long story arc. There's a lot good to be said about it, though I've seen others do it better. The costuming and sets are nicely done.
But other than that I just can't find anything to like. The acting is generally incompetent; it looks for all the world like the actors are only barely off book. Or maybe it's because the dialogue is so stilted nobody could make it sound good. A few of the regulars manage to carry it off; one or two even mange to look good.
But many of the regulars, nearly all of the non-famous guest stars, and even a few very talented guests sound completely incompetent. I just watched an episode with the hugely talented Michael York, and he chewed his way through the scenery as though it were chocolate.
I'm an actor and director myself. It's hard to separate out blame in the finished product without being on set, but it seems to be the fault of the writing and directing even more than the actors themselves. But I've heard people praise Straczynski's writing to the high heavens. I just don't get it. I don't care about the cheesy CG effects or corny music; it's the parts between the interstitials that set my teeth on edge.
Yeah, I already skipped through most of the first season. I'm now well into the third season, which was supposed to be pretty good. If it weren't for the fact that I'm trying to figure out why it's so important that it makes the front page of Slashdot, I'd long have given up.
So I don't believe I'm trolling when I ask: can somebody explain to me why I shouldn't consider the failure of this to become a movie anything other than a benefit to mankind?
The nice thing about Babylon 5, was that it had a complete story line before the first movie was even made. That means a completely intermixed story. The exact opposite from most other sci-fi shows that were out there at the time. Something that happens in the first episode actually means something, in one of the last episodes. (Londo's dream of how he will die.) And that is just the most obvious link. I for one had hoped that Crusade would have picked up where B5 left off, but it died a rather quick death. The movies were always good and it would have been great to see a new addition to the line.
I loved the B5 series and miss it. But given the [poor] quality of the B5 spinoff series (Crusade) and telemovies (Call to Arms, Legend of the Rangers), is this really so bad? Sorry, but this had to be said.
What's a sci-fi movie geek to do??
Ok, we got Episode III coming out, but I don't think I'm alone in saying that my expectations for Star Wars have been decidedly jaded in recent years.
I guess it'll have to be all about stuff like War of the Worlds, which I personally have very high hopes for after seeing some preview stuff, and moreover, Hitchhiker's Guide, which will either be the greatest sci-fi comedy since Space Balls (if not, dare I say, better?) or else it will be despised and insulted to levels of previously untold fury. I mean, it's the same problem faced by Peter Jackson for LotR. You have such a truly great literary work, and you have to turn it into film, carefully balancing the unwashed masses who've never read the book on one side, and the die-hard purists who've memorized it line-by-line on the other.
In canceling Enterprise, the powers that be eliminated a great source of suckiness. Now, to balance that, a great source of anti-suckiness must also be eliminated.
... it's understandable, it's 2005 now, B5 is OLD. So much has come after it. In a world that contains Farscape and Firefly, B5 does look childish, dated and a bit hackneyed. However, you have to remember that when this first came out it really was groundbreaking sci-fi. Most of what came after owes it a big debt.
So, you probably won't get it now. It's too late. If you'd watched it in 1994, you'd get it.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
The big missed oppurtunity was, when they were granted a 5th season, to do the Psi war on Earth. That would have been a good season.
I'm not a fanboy, but I was sufficiently entertained by the thing. You know what I liked the most about B5? It was so NOT the Trek universe of no money and everyone performing in string quartets in their free time. In B5 there was an economy, and trading, and the conflicts arising from such things. The telepaths were licensed and it was a professional position. One character watched old Daffy Duck cartoons in his spare time, and was building a motorcycle in his quarters. There were prejudices and factions and ill will from bulkhead to bulkhead. Space travel was a large and involved endeavor requiring complicated instrumentality.
And best of all, at least some of the aliens were not bipedal. Hell, I'd take space angels over the bumpy forehead of the week rut that trek got stuck in.
The rule of thumb in Hollywood is that for every thousand scripts that get written, only a few dozen get into development, and out of those, only one will ever get made...if that.
A little over a year ago, I was approached by a company that wanted to make a Babylon 5 movie. They optioned the rights, and commissioned a script. (It's worth mentioning that I, not WB, own the rights to a B5 movie. When we were negotiating the original B5 deal -- by whose terms I will never see a dime in profit -- the one thing they did let me have were the movie rights, figuring they'd never be worth anything in the long run.)
Anyway...on December 27th of 2003, the script for "The Memory of Shadows" was turned in, and the process began of trying to make the deal work with all the various forces involved. It is, to say the least, a very difficult process on any movie where the studio does not directly take the financial reins. In terms of B5, Warner's position was esssentially, "We only do big-budget movies with big names, so you're on your own." If there were big-name movie actors in the film, they'd get behind it; without that, things become very problematic, especially as far as the financing was concerned. You much have to put together a consortium of international interests and business plans rivaled in complexity only by the Allied invasion of Normandy Beach.
Nonetheless, every attempt was made by the people involved to get this deal in place. This was not being done by Doug or myself, but rather by the company/individuals who approached us and optioned the rights. At times, it seemed we were inches away from a deal...stages were reserved at Elstree, actors were contacted, a director was in place, the script went through many revisions, a few key staff were hired, again not by me...it was really a year-long roller coaster ride. During that time, the people involved, with every good intention, tried very hard to pull the necessary pieces together on the deal. The option expired in late December 2004, but I renewed it without cost, to give those involved more time to try and make things work.
In the end, however, the deal could not be put together, and it did not look as if that was going to change at any point in the foreseeable future. So the option has reverted, and to all intents and purposes, the project has dead ended. Nor do I think this particular incarnation will arise again at any point in the future, though prognostication has always been a tricky art, especially if you have to do it without the benefit of hindsight.
This was not the first time someone's taken a run at a B5 feature film, and it will not be the last. Eventually it will happen, because such things are simply inevitable. If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you can be sure that sooner or later, somebody's going to do a B5 movie. The only thing I can say without equivocation is that when that day comes, as the rights-holder, I will make darned sure that it's done right, because I'd rather have no B5 movie than one that doesn't live up to what fans and I myself would want to see.
To that end...I can wait.
Anyway, just thought you should know the story.
jms
Since Richard Biggs is dead, any new Babylon 5 production wouldn't quite have the same aura as the TV series. Dr. Franklin was a strong supporting character, whose presence would be sorely missed.
> No wonder WB likes B5 -- they don't have to pay you anything for it.
That's the great irony of the situation. The criteria told to us right up front while we were producing B5 was that each of the series on PTEN had to show a profit *in that year* in order to stay on the air and be renewed. So we'd have these meetings with studio heads who were congratulating us on how much money the show was making for them (again, while we were still making for it), and then look at me, realize what they'd said, and hurriedly add, "Though technically we're still in the red."> Kind of puts a different light on buying the DVDs and stuff, knowing
> we're just supporting some fat-ass studio execs and not the actual
> talent.
The show, all in, cost about $110 million to make. Each year of its original run, we know it showed a profit because they TOLD us so. And in one case, they actually showed us the figures. It's now been on the air worldwide for ten years. There's been merchandise, syndication, cable, books, you name it. The DVDs grossed roughly half a BILLION dollars (and that was just after they put out S5, without all of the S5 sales in).
So what does my last profit statement say? We're $80 million in the red.
Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits.
But then again, I knew that was the situation going in...I saw the writing on the wall (and the contract) from the git-go. I didn't do this to build an empire, I wanted to tell this story...and that's worth more than anything else.
Doesn't mean I can't tweak 'em about it, though.
jms
If you want good acting, and good writing, ignore B5 and go straight to the DS-9 box sets.
I wanted to like B5 and couldn't get into it for the exact same reasons you lay out. The acting and dialogue is absolutely abysmal. The B5 stories are very good, but not good enough to make the show watchable (for me).
-- John.
Too bad the new B5 movie got cancelled. Well, at least we got the theatrical version of Firefly and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to look forward to.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
(message content (c) 2005 by Synthetic Worlds, Ltd. Rights to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine)
I love JMS!
Having been previously burned by the Start Trek:Next Generation movies (ie, they sucked enormously) I have trouble getting excited about a B5 movie, no matter how great the original TV series may have been.
A typical 1 hour TV show minus commercials is about 42-45 minutes. And a typical movie is around 90 minutes. So, A B5 movie would be approximately the same length as a 2 part TV episode. So what is the point of 2 more B5 episodes?
Now, if he was trying to put together a 6-8 part TV mini-series, that would be pretty cool. With a TV series you can take your time and develope a story over several episodes, and if one of those episodes sucks, so what, you just move on to the next one.
But a B5 movie is pretty much guaranteed to suck simply because they have to try to cram as much as possible into this one movie, since there's no telling when there might be another one.
Read here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've heard people praise Straczynski's writing to the high heavens. I just don't get it. I don't care about the cheesy CG effects or corny music; it's the parts between the interstitials that set my teeth on edge.
...followed by the statement:
Yeah, I already skipped through most of the first season. I'm now well into the third season,
So... you didn't see most of the first season, and aren't even finished with the third. B5's story spans all five seasons and is the best thing about the show that casual and diehard fans name time and time again. The story, which you have seen less than two-fifths of, and so it gets a passing mention of...
There's a lot good to be said about it
though I've seen others do it better.
You haven't even seen the whole story - how can you say for sure that someone else has done it better? You don't even fully know what it is that you're comparing!
Then you expound on the acting for a while after that. Yes, there is an acknowledged inconsistent quality in the acting.
I'm an actor and director myself.
In the IMDb, are you? Not that this means everything, but honestly, anyone can be "an actor an director." Whether you've made anything worth a damn to anyone but yourself is a totally different story.
I've heard people praise Straczynski's writing to the high heavens. I just don't get it.
Of course you don't. You haven't even finished half the story.
can somebody explain to me why I shouldn't consider the failure of this to become a movie anything other than a benefit to mankind?
Because you've barely seen anything of the series and therefore cannot make an informed judgment. Is that a good enough explanation?
The coolest voice ever.
So, how about more truly NEW stuff
;-)
Well, there was Firefly...
But the problem with new stuff is it's a risk. Old stuff has brand recognition, wich means a garanteed return on the investment. How else would a hack like Berman manage to keep producing crap like he's done for years if not hrough sheer inertia?
The Matrix was a nice new take on things, Battlestar Galactica is cool, but part of me is tired of the 'hoping to find earth' theme that Voyager beat into the ground.
The Matrix killed itself by replacing some nice cyberpunk post apocalyptic sci-fi with trite pseudo religious handwaving magic.
Like, seriously, way to blow your franchise, dumbasses.
Galactica has high quality production values coming out of it's ears, but no originality whatsoever. What with being a remake and all. Still, it's nice to have shiny evil space robots being shot at by babes on TV, makes life seem more worthwile
You can't take the sky from me...
No wonder I heard a bunch of nerds screaming in unison earlier in the IT division at college.. Ears are still ringing.
I came to Babylon 5 rather late, after it had originally aired. I remember seeing individual episodes from the first season, and thinking that, meh, the effects were pretty spiffy but I really didn't know who anyone was.
I watched the whole thing last year and came to a somewhat different conclusion. jms ruined me for lesser SF. I can no longer stand most TNG or DS9 episodes. (Though I may yet watch DS9 as a whole---maybe it's good that way.)
jms made a five-year novel-for-television. We shall not see one man's vision so clearly transferred to the small screen for a long, long time, if ever again.
This is just a final middle-finger from the industry to jms. Punks.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Also, the getting rid of the commander at the end of the first season wasn't planned. And, as far as I know, Delenn and Sheridan hooking up wasn't planned at first. (Delenn was originally supposed to be voiced by a man, after all...)
So, a lot of people insist that it had a complete 5 year story arc that was set in stone from the beginning, but they changed it around a lot as production progressed. I don't dislike the show, but I think the people who rave about the perfection of the story arc are over stating how impressive it really was.
Remember that time in Star Trek when there were a race of aliens that hid behind an exo suit from human eyes, the episode called "Is There in Truth No Beauty?"?
The ones where the aliens were excellent navigators and/or pilots, but were said to be so ugly that the human mind couldn't cope with seeing their true form?
Remeber how we'd be shown only glipses of the light coming out of their opaque enclosure as it was opened by someone?
I sure did whenever I watched a B5 ep where they discussed the Vorlon's hiding their true self, expecially when we got a glimpse of their true form's light shining out as someone was opening their opaque encounter suit.
I'm also reminded of that anytime someone mentions that B5 "unlike ST" had the occasionnal cameo from a non-humanoid alien. Despite their many, many humanoid alien races.
by myowntrueself (607117) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 26, @04:33PM (#11789285)
Remind me, in which episodes do we get to see tholians?
But I'm guessing from that lil' reply of yours that you meant to imply that B5 is better than ST because they had better looking non-humanoid cameos? When that has nothing to do with being B5 or ST, and everything to do with the current state of SFX technology and the budget of the show.
Then again, I'm sure you can find any number of 15 year olds to get on the board "old shows with bad SFX were bad because they're OLD" boat.
You can't take the sky from me...
And while the character Delenn was originally supposed to be a man, this would not have lasted. [SPOILER WARNING] When Delenn undergoes her transformation at the end of season one, the process was originally supposed to be not just from Minbari to a Minbari/human hybrid ... but also from male to female. JMS's detailed comments on such can be found here.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a forum where readers are occasionally allowed to disagree. :-)
To appreciate "Babylon 5", it perhaps helps to have been there when it first aired. This was ten years ago, when ST:TNG was an uncategorical success by any measure, ST:DS9 was well underway with plenty of funding, and studios were jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon left and right.
After several years of ST:TNG, we get B5 -- a somewhat gritty, dirtier version of the future which resembles our present world a heck of a lot better than Roddenbery's universe. The aliens are more alien. The technology follows the known laws of physics (well, aside from hyperspace). And the effects? Well, they may look substandard today, but at the time that was cutting-edge CGI and it was being used on a weekly television program. In fact, JMS was proud of saying that his show would come in consistently under budget because of the cost savings over model-based special effects.
It was a breath of fresh air for sci-fi fans who were tired of the sanitized Star Trek universe and wanted something more realistic now. On top of that, it employed a multi-season story arc which, despite the kinks thrown in by actors leaving and the fifth season almost getting cancelled, worked incredibly well and was a radical approach to television. (To look at it another way, of course, is to say the departing actors and near-death of season 5 illustrates exactly why television shows usually approach each season open-ended.)
And what a story -- it looked like just aliens fighting it out diplomatically and Earth getting caught in the middle. Instead we get galactic-scale alien civilizations stretching millenia back into time, alien religious prophecies coming true, a conspiracy to take over Earth's government and implement fascism in its stead, telepaths running their own plan for controlling everything, all while this little tin can orbiting Epsilon 3 at the @$$-end of space is dealing with union strikes, budgetary constraints, refugees from alien wars, and the occasional drug bust.
Simply put, it was the kind of thing we knew we'd never see in Star Trek. DS9 came close to it (partly because it was, intentionally or not, borrowing heavily from JMS's ideas), but B5 was there first. Roddenberry's edict was basically that Starfleet and humanity in general appear pristine and perfect to project hope for the future; JMS declared that humans in the future would be just like humans today, and despite that (or because of it) we'd still grow to be masters of the galaxy in the millenia to come.
Oh, and there's also Ivanova. Regardless what you think about the acting, it's impossible not to like Ivanova.
Oh, and as a postscript: despite what I said about respecting others' opinions, and regardless of your experience in the field, if you think Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar is an ineffective actor, you're just not paying attention.
The problem with season five was that JMS rushed to finish as much of story as possible in season four because they were essentially cancelled. I believe that B5 was only narrowly picked up for the fifth season.
That's why the makeup was different in "The Gathering", in fact: they were specifically trying to give Mira Furlan an androgynous look since even then they were still trying to make Delenn male. In the end, however, it was scrapped because the idea was more ambitious than the technology they had on hand. (Specifically, they couldn't tweak the voice to a more male timber without it sounding unbearably "off".)
"Nothing's the same anymore."
For those of you who can go to Hollywood: There's a show benefit for Richard Biggs' kids on the 19th of March.
Some of Rick's colleagues from Days of Our Lives, Babylon 5, and General Hospital will be there.
http://www.richardbiggs.com/
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
And I just blew my money on a new 100 GB hard drive to hold the digital theater version of it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Paramount is expected to announce a new Star Trek movie unrelated to previous Star Trek characters on Monday.
That's what I mean!!!
Enterprise gets cancelled.
The B5 movie falls through.
_And_ the next ST movie gets announced.
THREE bad things in only a couple weeks!
Seriously. I have established cross-cultural friendships with people who _don't_ spend their vacation in full Klingon costume and I've actually taken me one or two of them fancy college film courses. Trust me. _All_ the ST movies can be lined up in a range from Sunday afternoon mall fodder down to the embarassing.
B5, no. ST, yes. Fate, where is thy justice?
Even if it takes a thousand years, we will have our movie :)