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Take My Money, Not My Sky! Firefly Reboot at Disney+ Rumour


SpaceChampion

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My source tells me they’re planning to target it more at a PG-adventure, family audience and less at the sort of PG-13 dynamic the original Joss Whedon show went for.

... and I immediately lost interest.

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If you're gonna make a show that's like Firefly, but more fun and adventure-y and all that, then make a show that is like Firefly, but more fun and adventure-y and all that, and don't fucking call it Firefly. It's not as if 'scoundrels tooling about on a ragged spaceboat' is a very specific concept they need the rights to use.

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.  My source tells me they’re planning to target it more at a PG-adventure, family audience and less at the sort of PG-13 dynamic the original Joss Whedon show went for.

Ugh. Seriously please don’t do this.

Unless you can bring back the original cast then really just don’t bother. Go away Disney

 

oh someone already quoted this horrible line

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56 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

If you're gonna make a show that's like Firefly, but more fun and adventure-y and all that, then make a show that is like Firefly, but more fun and adventure-y and all that, and don't fucking call it Firefly. It's not as if 'scoundrels tooling about on a ragged spaceboat' is a very specific concept they need the rights to use.

It would also have the advantage that it wouldn't be constantly compared to the original.

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Not one of the reliable news sites, and none of the reliable ones have had so much as a whiff of this.

Firefly is, in overall terms, still obscure to a mainstream audience, so if you bring it back you need the old fans on board to help with positive noise. Pissing them off by ditching the previous cast and continuity and making it more of a family show (if only mildly, to make it similar in tone to say The Mandalorian) and you get nothing but bad publicity and you wipe out the only people who'd be pre-invested in the property. It's a waste of time.

That said, if you did want to bring Firefly back without Joss Whedon's involvement, you could probably get away with that now, whilst a few years ago you definitely couldn't.

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I think this article is BS.

Disney just revealed a product plan consisting of a massive Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios slate, plus the Pixar and live action stuff. Why would that take this on? Why wouldn't they just bring Joss back to contribute to any of the stuff mentioned above?

I never watched the TV show but I was familiar enough with it that I saw the film in theaters and I really liked it.* Even if it had a certain "televisual" feel to it, I thought it was really interesting, funny, and reasonably well made. I thought it might be cool to see more of it. 

I knew the TV series ended before its time, but I didn't know this; but the movie lost money. From IMDB:

Budget: $39,000,000 (estimated)

Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $40,445,129

As a rule of thumb, a feature film needs to make 2.0-2.5x its production budget to break even. This didn't come close. I couldn't find DVD/Blu Ray sales for the film.  According to thenumbers.com, season 1 of the TV show sold $47,406,787 from 2007 through the end of 2012, meaning the profits from the series may have almost offset the losses from the film.

Is is possible the popularity of this series has been overstated? Does it appeal to only a small fraction of geekdom? Do the normies even care?

Short of some kind of global "Snyder cut" style social media phenomenon, I don't see it happening.

 

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4 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

As a rule of thumb, a feature film needs to make 2.0-2.5x its production budget to break even. This didn't come close. I couldn't find DVD/Blu Ray sales for the film.  According to thenumbers.com, season 1 of the TV show sold $47,406,787 from 2007 through the end of 2012, meaning the profits from the series may have almost offset the losses from the film.

That's due to marketing and Serenity had jack shit marketing, so that wasn't really a consideration. The film has definitely turned a profit through 15 years of media and streaming sales.

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7 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That's due to marketing and Serenity had jack shit marketing, so that wasn't really a consideration. The film has definitely turned a profit through 15 years of media and streaming sales.

I don't agree. Even if the prints and advertising budget was relatively small (say, around $10 million), that's still massive compared to the production budget. And I definitely remember seeing commercials and trailers for it. I promise you I wouldn't have known about it otherwise; me not being a follower of the series.

According to Boxofficemojo, it opened on almost 2200 screens domestically. Not as big a release as other films that year (Phantom Menace was 3600 screens), but still quite large for 2005.

It may have gained a following since, I don't know.

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Not one of the reliable news sites, and none of the reliable ones have had so much as a whiff of this.

Firefly is, in overall terms, still obscure to a mainstream audience, so if you bring it back you need the old fans on board to help with positive noise. Pissing them off by ditching the previous cast and continuity and making it more of a family show (if only mildly, to make it similar in tone to say The Mandalorian) and you get nothing but bad publicity and you wipe out the only people who'd be pre-invested in the property. It's a waste of time.

That said, if you did want to bring Firefly back without Joss Whedon's involvement, you could probably get away with that now, whilst a few years ago you definitely couldn't.

That was my first thought "isn't family friendly, more fun firefly just another mandalorian"?

They should adapt the jetty jay books - the most firefly stories out there without being a rip off or carbon copy.

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14 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Is is possible the popularity of this series has been overstated? Does it appeal to only a small fraction of geekdom? Do the normies even care?

We need to take into consideration all the popular culture changes that happened since Firefly and Serenity were made.

It's a lot geekier society we live in right now. Or at least in one that's a lot more likely to adopt geeky stuff. All the MCU movies, Nolan's Batman trilogy, Harry Potter movies (some of them were already released at the time of Firefly/Serenity, though) and spin-offs, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, even Big Bang Theory and a whole lot of other series and movies kind of cracked TV and movie audience wide open for geeky content.

If the show creators succeed in making some buzz online among the fans who watched the original series I can see a huge audience tuning in.

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1 hour ago, baxus said:

If the show creators succeed in making some buzz online among the fans who watched the original series I can see a huge audience tuning in.

This.

While I'm still skeptical, it's possible this news isn't actually a leak, but a case of the studio quietly putting something out to gauge the reaction.

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1 hour ago, baxus said:

We need to take into consideration all the popular culture changes that happened since Firefly and Serenity were made.

It's a lot geekier society we live in right now. Or at least in one that's a lot more likely to adopt geeky stuff. All the MCU movies, Nolan's Batman trilogy, Harry Potter movies (some of them were already released at the time of Firefly/Serenity, though) and spin-offs, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, even Big Bang Theory and a whole lot of other series and movies kind of cracked TV and movie audience wide open for geeky content.

If the show creators succeed in making some buzz online among the fans who watched the original series I can see a huge audience tuning in.

You could also say we've seen a huge over saturation of geek culture flood into the media, to the point where it is hard to get noticed any more. 

When Firefly came out there was far fewer of that type of show around. I remember it was around the same time that BSG came out and both of those blew my mind as to what was possible. It was the beginning of the TV golden age but we had rarely seen decent quality Sci Fi or Fantasy on TV (Maybe there was Babylon 5 earlier and iffy franchises like Stargate).

I'd say these days it is going to be really hard to get noticed. There are a ton of Sci Fi shows out there on the many different platforms. Raised by Wolves and Brave New World were the first to come to mind as two shows that would have excited me and blown me away, but now they get lost in the sea of media and I barely bothered to check them out. 

As for Firefly, I don't think the buzz is strong enough to really push it into the public consciousness. It gained a cult following at one point amongst geeks of a certain age, but that was fuelled by it's premature cancellation. Why would anyone care now?
Then if you remove everything that actually made the show good, and it literally was Joss Whedon and the cast who made the show good more than anything else, then what do you actually have? It would just be a faceless riff on space cowboys that we've seen many times before. I mean what else is actually interesting about the show? That they sometimes speak Chinese? Meh!

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4 hours ago, dog-days said:

That they sometimes speak Chinese eardrum-burstingly badly. 

Because Chinese culture would apparently be hugely influential in the future, though obviously not to the extent where any Chinese actor could be considered for a speaking part.

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