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Any Prospect of Serenity Sequel Quashed
Shadowruni writes "According to IGN.com, there will be no sequel to Serenity." Update: 10/07 01:31 GMT by Z : As enjerth pointed out below, this is not 100% accurate. Don't believe IGN, is the lesson. Here's the word from the man himself: "I turn my back for five minutes (that's how long it takes to admire my lovely back) and the interweb goes banoonoos! Isn't there any ACTUAL news to get wrong? Sorry about all this; it might be best if I just stay off the computer for a while ... The brain place is crowded with goods, ideas, sequels, spinoffs, animated versions, miniseries, radio dramas -- this is just the used goods. All the new wares are in there as well and it's deafening. Once I create a verse I never let go of it. And figuring out how much of my energy should be devoted to reawakening the projects you all love with the actors and characters I all love, and how much should be forging ahead and creating entirely new works (which you are contractually obligated to love) is exhausting."
. . . there's no reason it couldn't happen. It just isn't happening now, and is less likely as time goes by.
No sequel...I get it...so tell me about the prequel you are working on... Dave
Firefly is over so I can only hope Battlestar Gallactica gets the steam it needs to have a feature film. It could be very well received given the way BSG is grabbing non-SciFi people.
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I didn't follow Firefly, and I saw Serenity about 4 months ago. (Please don't revoke my geek card)
I must say, it was one of my favorite SciFi flicks to date. It totally surprised me, decent story, decent graphics. I recommended it to a lot of my friends. I described it loosely as if they made a movie about Han Solo. (rugged, funny thief...they almost dressed the same)
I was looking forward to another movie. I like the SciFiWestern combo that he pulled off.
Maybe I will just have to start watching Firefly.
Cheers,
TFG
The article is exagerated.
Many sites ran with similar stories, taking Joss Whedon's words out of context.
From Whedonesque http://whedonesque.com/comments/11513#144407:
[snip]
If you missed all the fun, at the weekend Joss responded to the latest Serenity sequel rumour and quite rightly knocked it on the head. Several sites picked up on what he said and took his remarks to mean that there would be never be a sequel to Serenity.
[snip]
And in this thread, Joss Whedon replies http://whedonesque.com/comments/11513#144407 with the following:
[snip]
Isn't there any ACTUAL news to get wrong? Sorry about all this; it might be best if I just stay off the computer for a while. Or just glut the feed with wild conjecture. Hmm, let's see... I'm me, so... let's glut! Here are some ABSOLUTELY TRUE statements of factiness. Gentlemen, start your websites.
[snip]
Joss was putting to rest the rumor that he was working on Serenity 2, not saying that there will never be a Serenity 2.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The Serenity sequel is like a leaf on the wind. Leaf on the wi***CRUNCH***
I was seriously hoping for some kind of resurrection of the character played by Christina Hendricks in "Our Mrs. Reynolds" and "Trash." I'm sure some of you remember the salaciously hot redhead.
It's a shame when shows like Firefly get axed when so much crap survives. But, I hate to admit it, I missed Firefly on TV and only got hip to it on DVD. What a shame.
I think it's a tribute to Joss that he got the movie made at all. And anyone who saw the film knew it was the end.
"Little House on the Prairie - IN SPACE" failed. Get over it.
I liked Firefly & Serenity a lot, but that was awesome!
Thanks.
DN
Sad to say, but it really won't. I didn't watch it when it was running, but I watched it before the movie came out and really enjoyed it. The movie was pretty decent too.
I think the problem with Serenity is that it's simply too sophisticated for your WWF fan types. The chinese expressions mixed in, six-gun slingers in space ships. It's just too much for a Nascar fan to cope with. I'm not saying the show is without its fans. I simply think that the average viewer can't quite get it, at least in the States, and that's too bad. It had a lot of originality and even though it had some rough edges, I think they would have really found their groove with another season.
This series made my head snap around, which is more than I can say about 80% of the scifi in the past ten years.
Geez, the guy could suck the vampire franchise dry (sorry), you'd think he could soldier on without the likes of Wash and make it more/better/shinier. Even with the resolutions of the movie and all. One of my favorite quotes about anything creative is from Joss: "Restrictions are great because they make you more imaginative. They make you rethink things, they make you not-do the obvious." I'd say he set lots of restrictions on his existing story line and had no where to go but massively creative.
These characters were as salty / grounded / lofty / eye-twinkling / inventive as my favorite Heinlein characters. Even the trademark behaviors were just tweaked enough and were gently dashed often enough to keep you thinking "what's next?"
To quote Wash, this series told the rest of the scifi world "Here's something you can't do..."
We live in a world "Head of the Class" stays on the air for five seasons. Ya'd think they could keep this stuff rolling for more than one.
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Actually that's a loss. Some inside quotes. For the first week the studio gets 60% of the boxoffice. After that it generally drops to 50% with it continuing to drop with the theater owners making an increasing percentage, 60%+. The studio would have made a little less than 20 mill off the theatrical take with ten mill for advertising being conservative. If it made 13 mill on DVD sales that means they made back less than 23 mill on a 39 mill investment. That's extremely bad. I think it was badly marketed which cost it sales but it's unlikely to have ever broke even making it a very bad risk for the studio to make sequels. I liked the movie version but it didn't even come close to seeing a profit based on the numbers you provided.
and always leave them wanting more.
The alternative being: milk it to death and leave them cursing the name "Lucas."
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
I always wanted to know more about Shepherd Book. People were always saying "He's not a Shepherd", but no one ever said what he actually WAS.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
He's writing the Wonder Woman movie, then after that he has a movie called "Goners." This is in addition to his X-Men comics.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
They were competing with Star Wars cast, Star Trek cast, BSG cast and Stargate, and who knows who else, and every single one of those franchises had seen more airtime and more hours filmed than the entire Firefly universe, but those two were the most popular people by an outrageous margin. I would say an entire order of magnitutde.
Now consider how financially successful Star Treks and Star Warses have been and how hard to you have to slap FOX executives up one side and down the other for intentionally strangling this wonderful series so cruelly that the creator cannot even rationally consider attempting to bring it back to life?
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If you didn't think something like that was vintage Joss, you don't really know his style. It is part and parcel of Whedon to make you thoroughly love a character and strive fully alongside them for their hopes and desires, and then snatch it away from you with their death. These characters were risking everything for their dearly-held beliefs and it was only right and true that some of them paid with everything. When I was younger I wrote scifi stories with lots of lasers and danger, but for some reason I just couldn't cause much harm to my characters. The most that would happen was someone's arm would be hurt. Big fucking deal. As I grew into the thing I realized that all that passion means nothing without sacrifice. Joss kills off important characters to get your attention and make you believe that anything could happen. He's been doing it since the early days of Buffy -- he makes it very clear in some of the 1st season commentary that he wanted to start the series off by putting a character in the title sequence and killing them off in the second or third episode. He went ahead and killed the character, but he didn't have the money for the extra titles.
And he came back and went ahead and did it titles and all with Tara later on -- just to accentuate that the business of life in danger is a serious one.
I don't think that Wash's death was why Serenity didn't make that much money. I think it slept hard at the box office because it was under-publicized and under-promoted by the studios and given the kind of shit treatment that the series was given because they didn't fucking believe it could succeed. They couldn't give it the credit for being the great piece of work, and in today's box office environment if something doesn't literally explode out of the theatres in less than two weeks they yank it and send it to DVD. Serenity would have wiped the floor with every other piece of shit movie that came out that year if we weren't in the era of saltine-box multiplexes. It would have started quiet in the tiny distro it was originally given, and just kept on bringing people in, and bringin them in, and bringing them in. It's a gorram good movie, and I could watch it eight or ten times in a row (and I actually did) without getting sick of it.
You're pouty because a character got killed and the movie didn't go the way you wanted it to. But Joss knows very well that producing one bland "the gang's all here" sequel after another (like George Lucas started to do after Empire) will ultimately force you to churn out pablum oriented towards seven-year-olds that your adult audience can just barely stomach. And Whedon isn't quite ready to be a whore like George Lucas. So he takes risks with his characters, and allows their situations to evolve.
He's young yet. I don't think we've seen the last of what he's got to offer. The current film culture of Hollywood is so stagnant and predictable that I think it's highly at risk of being completely blown away by some new emerging dynamic. And I think Joss is part of that.
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I agree that it sucked, but I disagree that it's bad storytelling. Just because the good guys don't always get off scott-free and somebody you love dies doesn't make it a bad movie; it just shows that real life sometimes does crap like that to you. It's not all touchy-feely good times all the time. When my own brother died at the age of 16, I thought that was some pretty poor plot development, too. Kudos to Whedon for a ballsy move and taking the movie someplace serious. Sometimes you have to know loss before you can truly appreciate love.
For all you know, he was planning on doing it at some point during the series, anyway. Now you've opened up the possibility of Zoe's character actually going to some dark places as a result that could be quite interesting, as well as making things complicated for the captain (because things never just go smooth.)
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I couldn't agree more. Joss's willingness to take risks with his characters makes the stories he is telling more realistic and engaging. It sucked when he killed a fan favorite, but in doing so, he hammered home the fact that the rest of the characters might not survive.
I agree about writing with your own characters. Its very difficult to take risks with them, and in my (mostly unfinished) stories, I had to create red shirts so my stars would make it out all right. As I'm learning now, that doesn't make it fun.
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