Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Good thing fox cancelled Firefly. There's clearly no public interest in that franchise.
Yes, the selling out of these theaters before the list of theaters showing it was even out is a good indication that this movie will tank.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
So has Fox dropped another franchise on its way to success? Are they going to pick the ball back up like they did with Family Guy?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Several of the screenings sold out before they were even announced. Many enterprising Browncoats "hacked" the Fandango URL until they found the screenings.
"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."
Ladies and Gentlemen. Now THOSE are fans.
...but who the hell is Joss Whedon, and what the hell is Serenity?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
You guys need to get the idea out of your head that a highly devoted fanbase is the same as a large fanbase. Just because some rather limited amounts of seats sell out instantly doesn't mean the movie can't flop.
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.
Dang, this is popular!
They should make a TV show out of it or something...
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Fox couldn't stand having themselves portrayed as the baddies.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
One of the obvious reasons is that Firefly was a science fiction television show, which is generally a fairly nerdy entertainment. In addition, Firefly is generally regarded as a very good science fiction show that some might mention in the same breath as Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Babylon 5.
You probably could argue that TV is generally lame, and that is difficult to dispute. However, I've found Joss Whedon's work to be generally better than most of the shows out there. He deals with a lot of interesting themes in a very entertaining way without talking down to his audience.
More than that, he takes risks with his work. He kills off beloved characters if it serves his story, regardless of the fan reaction. He did a show that was almost entirely without dialogue and an hour-long musical episode.
These approaches could have ended up as cheap gimmicks, but usually they worked really well. I think a lot of people want to see entertainment that does try to be different. I think geeks and nerds are used to seeing value in things that other people might not understand.
Is a sci-fi movie ultimately stuff that matters? Perhaps not compared perhaps to environmental issues, war, and politics. But life has to be about more than that. Art, music, and culture have their places as well. Wide availablity and low accessibility don't necessarily disqualify popular mediums from being art and being important in its own way.
It sounds like you haven't really seen any of Mr. Whedon's work. I suggest you rent a few of the Buffy TV series DVD's or the Firefly collection and try it. You might find you like it, or at the very least, have a more informed dislike of it.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
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.
The ______ Agenda
I used to work with one of the guys that was one of the animators on Titan AE at the Fox studios in Phoenix. He said that it was rather disappointing what was happening. Everyone at the studio knew they were being laid off and the studio was going to close after the movie was finished. As it progressed, people either were leaving or being laid off as they were no longer needed. Right at the end of the movie's development, there was nothing but a skeleton crew there. Fox just didn't care about Titan AE and didn't give it much of a chance (sounds like the series that is currently being discussed). As such, there was not much put into the movie by the people working on it. I'd imagine that played a role in the movie's success/failure.
the general film audience likes character development?
i thought they just liked explosions and sex.
Rick Berman? Is that you? Tell us more of this great wisdom about how to pummel a science fiction franchise into the ground.