Slashdot Mirror
Serenity Screenings Sell Out
DizzyEllie writes "Last Wednesday, Universal offered fans of Joss Whedon's Serenity the unique opportunity to screen an unfinished version of the movie in ten cities. This was originally intended to pull both fans and non-fans into the fold, but the screenings sold out so quickly (less than a day for all cities to sell-out, but reportably just a few minutes in a couple of locations), it is clear that only the hard-core fanbase will make it in. This seemed to be completely unexpected by Universal, as ads were appearing in newspapers after the sell out, and incentives for the fans to promote the screenings were removed. The screenings will be held in 10 cities on May 5. Serenity: The Official Movie Website" Definitely a unique promo thing. Shows serious stones too- I mean, if the movie sucked, they wouldn't dare do something like this. Hopefully someone will post a review for us on wednesday. And the rest of us suckers have to wait until September. Bah.
With an announcement by Joss Whedon at the Serenity official web site, the tickets to this event went on sale at just after midnight Wednesday morning. By dawn, most of the cities were sold out. By 9 a.m., all of the cities were sold out.
I happened to trip over the announcement at 1 a.m, woke the wife, and scored our tickets. We're very excited about it!!!
What's it about? One good quote that I read was, "Imagine if Star Wars had been about Han instead of Luke." (but with much, much better writing and no damned cutsie aliens).
There have been several test screenings in the past to tune the movie. Almost always, the word leaked and these turned into flash mob events for Firefly/Whedon fans. This 10 city screening is a little different. The movie is nearly the finished product, but the purpose is to incite the fan base into a word-of-mouth guerilla marketing machine.
Universal apparently thought that there was going to be trouble getting butts into seats, and created a marketing campaign and ads just for this screening. With 30,000+ registered fans at the official Serenity website, they need not have worried about that. A couple of folks have even put their tickets on eBay with bidding now at absurd levels.
This promises to be big! Check out the trailer!
Firefly was so badly mishandled by FOX that I'd like to add at least one more piece of information for those who are not familiar with it. When you hear mainly that it is from the creator of Buffy and Angel you might get the idea that you would only be interested if you enjoyed one of those. I've tried watching both of those series off and on but without success.
... it comes out far ahead.
I only bothered to do so because having seen Firefly in the intended order from the DVD's I'm sold on the idea that it is the best sci fi series ever made for TV. I can't say I have a similar opinion of Mr Whedon's other series but Firefly has such superior writing and characters that I can't imagine even trying to make a comparison to the other franchises that I enjoy but do not admire nearly as much.
If you haven't seen the series or only saw a few confusingly presented episodes from the FOX debacle (boy I hope some of the morons responsible for that were fired) rent the episodes in order from your local video store or NetFlix. I'm not saying I can't imagine a better series but when compared to its peers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Babylon 5,
i think the point was that it sold out before the ads were even out. it spread by word of mouth, or online. not shocking to us, but the fact that there were so many people that watched the show (or the DVDs) that still were keeping up to the minute with news.
makes you wonder how the show failed so fast. was it because it was on friday nights, or because it was shown out of sequence (the pilot being shown last) or is the TV rating system flawed enough that they may miss a whole demographic of people that use VCRs/TiVo to catch shows.