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09 January 2006


Serenity And Beyond
Exclusive: Whedon on Firefly's future

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Browncoats around the world cried out in despair when, due to an underwhelming performance at the box office, Joss Whedon announced that the saga of Serenity had ended. No sequels, no follow-ups, no hope. But Whedon isn't a man to let his brain-child die; the man's already resuscitated the franchise once and there's still hope for a third coming.

"A sequel's unlikely," Whedon told Empire with a note of clear regret, "but it's amazing what permutations of something can happen." But if not a theatrical encore, that leaves... yes, you guessed it, a possible return to the smaller screen. "As long as I was able to service the characters with integrity and had enough money so that I wasn't hampered, then I would love to return Serenity to TV. I love that universe; it continues and those characters live on. There could be a series, there could be a miniseries, there could be all sorts of things. I'm not ruling anything out. I'll let it simmer for a while and see if anyone calls."

As for why the film failed to rake in the cash despite uniformly glowing reviews, according to Whedon it's all in the presentation. "It's a question of marketing ultimately. The fact that I like to dance around genres with gay abandon has worked to my disadvantage. Nobody knows exactly how to market anything I do because it usually has so much in it. It has a diffuseness because of it's origin that keeps it from being the easy sell. Some people also said that you can't call an action movie 'Serenity' but I think that's still okay. What was I going to call it? 'Big Smash Bang With Boobies'? Which was, of course my second choice."

DVD sales should, however, put Serenity back in the black and when the bucks start rolling in we can only hope that one of the suits at Universal looks at the numbers, adds the success of the Firefly DVD box set and greenlights a return for Captain Reynolds and his crew. Until that time we advise Whedon to keep his phone switched on.

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