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Second Round of Serenity Screenings Sold Out
j1ggl3x writes "From a Rotten Tomatoes news article:
'Following the sell-out success of the May 5th pre-screenings, creator Joss Whedon recently announced that more advance previews of his movie Serenity would appear at twenty theaters in twenty cities, this time on May 26th. By the next morning, well before the official list of cities was posted, fans on the Serenity movie site and elsewhere had diligently located half the listings through trial and error and several of the locations were already sold out. Serenity hits theaters on September 30th.'"
Several of the screenings sold out before they were even announced. Many enterprising Browncoats "hacked" the Fandango URL until they found the screenings.
Universal currently has a contract to make (I believe) as many Firefly movies as they want (there are currently talks of having it be a trilogy). However no one can make a Firefly TV show for something like 3 years.. so maybe after that we'll see a revamp of the show, although Mutant Enemy would be fools to try to get it on Fox.
Joss Whedon - Creator of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel.
Serenity - Feature length film based on Firefly, which Fox cancelled a couple of years ago.
"Serenity" - a forthcoming movie based upon Joss Whedon's television series *Firefly*, which was a near-hard SF show set about 400 years in the future after mankind had migrated to another star system. The show is about the crew of a ship, Serenity, that straddle the boundaries of legality (smuggling, but nothing bad; carrying fugitives from the big bad corporate government) and are mostly loyal to their captain, Mal, who is a veteran of the losing side in a civil war against the big bad corporate government. The show depicted two classes of worlds: high-tech core worlds, and low-tech "Western"-style frontier worlds. Joss Whedon wrote Alien: Resurrection, and created Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both movie and tv show), Angel, and a few other things.
You seem to forget - $40 is the MSRP. Wholesale is around $20. Production, distribution, etc will eat up about $5.
That works out to $15 profit per set, and doesn't include other potential expenses, so if 5 million sets were sold, that's only $75 million.
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It's also important to point out that Firefly, like Joss's better work, was a "serial," in that later episodes depended upon previous episodes to make any sense. Unfortunately, and dumfoundingly, Fox decided to air the series out-of-order, which led to the complaints that Firefly was "confusing" and "impossible to follow."
In other words, Fox blew their own series because they didn't know what they were doing.
It's also a space western, which is a pretty tough theme to like, but somehow managed to capture the essence of what worked with the episodes of Star Trek that worked. Even though pretty much none of the characters are good guys (the captain kills people who he thinks deserves it, the crew members betray eachother for money, the pilot keeps wearing Hawaiian shirts), they're somehow likable in a bad guy way... Sort of like Han before Lucas bastardized him into a saturday morning cartoon. The old-west themes of cattle rustling and smuggling just add to the charm and the outlaw atmosphere. It was a pretty good step, in other words, to reduce what will likely be a nastily complicated future involving DRM, standards compliances, interoperability problems, technological glitches, and complicated social procedures based upon years of snowballing bureaucracy to something archaically approachable focused more on characters. Not once in the entire 12 episodes was there a spot of technobabble or an episode focused upon getting the holodeck to work. It was all about the characters, which really shined through on the DVD's.
It was good, but Fox blew their chance by thinking that it was The Simpsons. Hopefully the movie will rectify this to some degree. And if the movie does well, they can replay the TV shows. Most people haven't seen them anyway.
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Firefly is an original creation. It's first incarnation was the television show that Fox castrated before the first season was even finished.
The movie happens some period of time after the episode 'Objects in Space', I've been told, but I have not seen it. I belive it follows the story, too.
Don't assume success to soon. Remember Private Parts, the Howard Stern movie? It opened HUGE, and did major box office for a couple of weeks. But once all his fans had seen it (sometimes twice), it's numbers dropped faster than one of his stripper guests dropping her top. What had been hailed as mega-hit actually ended up losing money. The fact is, the average person has probably never even heard of the Firefly series. So while it may be a snap to get fans excited, it's going to have a really tough time crossing over to the mainstream audience. Besides, isn't one space western enough? :)
Yes the DVD has been a hit. In numbers. But you can't say it made fox a fortune. It more than likely is just covering the costs that the show LOST during its run.
The show lost no money to Fox. Fox choose to pay for production, and then did not air it. Or aired it at exotic times in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I'm wondering if did better or worse than the test pattern or the infomercial on the other channels. Since no one knew in advance it would be on at that time, how could anyone see it?
You can't take the sky from me...
I hope that Serenity's storyline fits with the rest of the story and isn't just some random story made up just for a movie where the series can do without.
It takes place six month after "Objects in Space", and we get to learn River Tam's story.
Also: Reavers!
You can't take the sky from me...
I went to the first (May 5) screening and I have to say (as a big fan of the TV show) I was very impressed. They change a few things (personalities, relationships, etc.), but by and large the movie fits very well with the TV show and extends the story in a way that actually makes a lot of sense. Also, the movie kicks ass.
Did the shows cost nothing to produce? 14 episodes of a SciFi show.... i would bet $5million an episode is a reasonable estimate. Thats $70 million in costs right there. Plus marketing, blah blah blah.
Under two mill (and there was no marketing) - they made that back on the first run, but they wanted more, not just to break even.
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Anyone else think that having preview screenings in May for a film with a September release date is a bit insane? Why do it almost 5 months before it's released?
It was supposed to be released in late march.
But their producer's marketing department got wind of how much Lucas was putting in his promos and they decided that there was no way they could compete with his advertising, so they pushed it back.
You can't take the sky from me...