Futurama Movie Set For November 27

kevin_conaway writes "TV Squad informs us that the new Futurama movie will be available on November 27. The show will return as a full-length, high-def film sold on DVD. It will be followed by three additional films, and each film will be divided into four episodes, each to be aired on Comedy Central. So, that's 4 DVD movies or 16 new episodes."

Comments

Finally

[Tykho]

Life is worth living again!

Re:Any differences in the releases?

[AngryJim]

"Remember that it was the good DVD sales that brought Family Guy back."

Yeah and look how that turned out.

Don't forget

[Dachannien]

Rumor has it that one or more of these DVDs will feature a very special full-length episode of Everybody Loves Hypno-Toad.

All glory to the Hypno-Toad!

Re:I never really..

[dakameleon]

Lack of instant broad family appeal. The Simpsons has a character everyone can identify with, but Futurama has quirky characters that aren't as broad in their reach. I for one say Futurama is far funnier, but then I land smack-bang in its target audience, so I would wouldn't I.

Re:Networks

[Enderandrew]

Ummm? The reason Family Guy was brought back was because it got HIGH ratings on Comedy Central and TBS, as well as HIGH DVD sales. It was canceled because it was poorly marketed, and no one saw it before it was initially canceled.

And take a show like Firefly. They only aired like 6 episodes total, in different time-slots, out of order, and never advertised the show. They aired a whopping 4 episodes of Drive, which got good reviews from pretty much every critic on the planet, and it was canceled.

I'm not a big fan of TV, and I was never a Whedon fan. I really hated Buffy and Angel, but Firefly was a damned good show. It sold like man on DVD to the point where they made a movie. Initial ratings aren't always indicative of the quality of the show. Jerry Springer was the highest rated show on the entire planet for a while, and so was Baywatch. And sometimes really good shows how poor ratings because no one knows anything about them. Even though Firefly sold well on DVD and was critically acclaimed, most people still haven't heard about the show.

That is poor advertising on the part of the network.

Jericho is another fine example. The network canceled it because of "poor ratings" and it had a huge fan-base who spent money out of pocket to take out an ad in Variety, and ship tons of peanuts to the network demanding the show be brought back. How were the ratings so poor with so many fans?

The Neilsen ratings often don't pick up on people who record shows with their DVR, and they also don't account for the people who watch the show on CBS.com so the ratings really didn't accurately reflect how large of a fan base the show actually had. If the networks were "experts" as you put it, they wouldn't lose so much money every year developing all these new shows that bomb. They wouldn't have canceled shows like Futurama, Firefly, Family Guy or Jericho in the first place when market demand for these shows was so high that they made more money after cancellation than before.

I know a guy (we're not close friends, but we have spoke on a few occasions) who wrote Grosse Point Blank. (Great friggin' movie) and he kept getting approached by the networks to do some TV work. He had some great stories. No one wanted to touch anything new, because it wasn't established and they had no way to determine if it would be successful or not. However they kept asking him to make "The Next Friends" show, because Friends was huge at the time. Every week when the new movies came out, whatever was big in the box office, they'd tell him to clone that.

Just because someone has money, that doesn't make them an expert. Far from it. As Kevin Smith said, "Hollywood is the only place where you fail upwards."

Is "specialist" humour more "subtle"? IMHO, no.

[Dogtanian]

Also, many of the jokes are more subtle than those usual to the Simpsons, and probably people won't want to look at a cartoon and have to think harder to understand its humour. I'm not convinced; I think you've mistaken "specialist" humour that's more reliant upon knowledge of a particular area (including its pop-culture references) for genuine "subtlety".

The Simpsons *did* contain subtle humour in some areas. Whereas I feel Futurama's was very reliant upon parodying retro science fiction cliches and the old "aspects of present-day society given a futuristic twist" school of sci-fi comedy.

For my money, Futurama *never* felt like it would have the same universal appeal that The Simpsons managed so effectively. That's not to say that it was bad, but dakameleon put his (her?) finger on it very well when he said that The Simpsons had more characters people could identify with.

FWIW, I feel that The Simpsons actually has more creativity and freedom than Futurama. On first glance you'd expect the opposite, as being set in a fantasy future it has the freedom to do anything. In reality, it's quite tied by its retro sci-fi roots and reliance upon parody, both of which limit it creatively and in terms of audience appeal.

This probably sounds like I think Futurama sucks; I don't. It's all relative- but there are sound and legitimate reasons why it's not- and never will be- as well-loved as The Simpsons.

Re:Oblig.

[MutantHamster]

Just to give my 2 Quatlus on the issue of it coming back to "full production," I think the future (not to jinx it) may be kind of bright. Comedy Central bid really high for the rights to air episodes of Futurama and they are going to have the three movies broken up into a series of episodes. Given that it has a built in fanbase and is easily much higher in quality than the -- what, 10 new shows they debut each year that fail miserably? (I put my money on Lil' Bush, that Body Shop show, and that show about the Halfway House not coming back next year) My prediction if Futurama is going to be a smash for comedy central. And given that, it's not hard to imagine they'll want to comission a new season after that.

Mmm!

[Poromenos1]

Mod me insightful! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

--HypnoToad

Re:I never really..

[Lord Ender]

To fully appreciate Futurama

• You need to have read Asimov and Heinlein
  
• You must have seen pretty much all of ST:TOS
  
• You must have a college-level understanding of physics ("no fair! you changed the outcome by measuring it")
  
• You must have some understanding of American political history (President Nixon, etc.)
  
• You must know a bit about digital technology ("Don't worry, Bender. There's no such thing as 2.")
  
• Tou must not take religion too seriously ("sweet zombie Jesus!")
  

This is all true for the majority of my friends (who I know from engineering school or my career in software). However, my girlfriend's friends and my family can only check off one or two items on that list. They'll get a few laughs, sure. But even though The Simpsons and Family Guy are mediocre by comparison, those two shows never leave the majority of people thinking "I don't get it..." Futurama is just a masterpiece with a small audience, so it has less earning power.

The good news is that with Video over IP finally becoming cheap, HTPCs starting to catch on, and the popularity of DVD sales and rentals; the cost of entry to the TV show market is plummeting. The future looks good for shows like Futurama :-)