Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
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.
The Serenity sequel is like a leaf on the wind. Leaf on the wi***CRUNCH***
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
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?
My book, podcast
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.
My book, podcast