JMS teases Babylon 5 feature film at Comic-Con

That's what I thought of. ShakaZulu is a PsiCop, watch what you're thinking.

Spider in the web!

We'll be killed by shadows!

 

Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow. The square root of 906.01 is 30.1...



Yeah, anyway...are people seriously suggesting JMS should try to circumvent WB's TV rights and wind up in court with a massive lawsuit that'd sink his new studio in zero time flat? No? OK, I didn't think so.

 

Somehow I just knew you were going to say that.

 

Yeah...back in those days they also had double features and newsreels. Don't think it's applicable today. Though as short as movies are getting these days, I imagine the theaters might encourage that.

Jan

 

Yeah, but I'm talking more about the demographic. The Weekly World News audience.

Exercises for the student never sound promising.

Otherwise known as the lowest common denominator. Or Joe Six-Pack. It's a Sarah Palin World.

 

People outside our little corner of geek fandom may still have a wide range of hobbies and interests. It's incredibly smug and insular to assume they're tedious or unintelligent drones.

 

There's nothing inherent in fascination with skiffy stuff that correlates with a person being intelligent or even particularly interesting. That's always been true, and the current output of the entertainment industry as directed at skiffy fans just reinforces it.

 

Doctor Who episodes which are greater than 70 minutes are called "Feature Length", so, it seems anything over 70 minutes (Or maybe 75? or even more than 65?) is considered Feature Length (Not that I'm advocating JMS trying to pull a fast one)

 

That's a UK contract, not US. Definitions and rates are probably very very different. At least I know that contract lengths and number of re-writes allowed are hugely different so I'm assuming (dangerous, I know) that there are lots of other differences.

That said, I did take a cursory look at the WGA contract and it seemed to me that the destination may determine what defines a movie or TV screenplay. I don't really know.

Jan

 

Reminds me of what good ol' Uncle Harlan (Ellison) has said about fandom:

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0zSkCXPEc&index=9&list=PLJub7A0seyt__z2Y8OQKdbuGo3KhdyRk5[/yt]

 

Plus it probably doesn't help that said insult came from the freaking space Gestapo.

 

Wide range of hobbies!?

Sport and begging for sex from the wife.

Stamps.

Model trains.

Oh! Fucking gardening.

Gardening is what men do when they don't want to have sex with their wife.

Sigh.

 

Don't forget mumbledepeg!

 

I think 'Taken 2' didn't even make it to 90, but yeah, those are the exception. These days the average seems to be 2 - 2.5hrs.

Regardless, I can't see an 80-100M budget straight-to-DVD-movie making much of that money back. Those things are usually either DIRT cheap or so badly done the studio is just cutting it's losses at that point.

I mean one assumes JMS would actually like the movie to make a profit, no? It's still a business and if he wants investors to keep financing his productions then they need to show an appropriate return.

 

Did I miss a post? When did direct-to-DVD enter the picture? I didn't get any impression from JMS' announcement that this would be anything other than a full feature film with theater distribution. In fact, he already mentioned film distributors in his announcement.

The question I've got that I hope to find out in a couple of years is how the film will overcome what 'Serenity' ran into. I thought that was a good movie that didn't require previous knowledge of 'Firefly'. Yet it really didn't do well in theaters, probably only making a small profit long after it went to DVD. It's that sort of thing that disheartened me when thinking about a B5 film.

Jan

 

No, nothing JMS said, just alternatives that people were suggesting here. Maybe I misread, but I assumed that was what people were intimating when talking about making a 70min movie for TV to circumvent not having the TV rights. Either way; yeah, not a good idea.

As far as I can tell, 'Serenity' failed because the studio saw it as a risk and didn't promote it. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy dontcha think? Sadly a similar thing happened to Dredd.

Hell, over here 'Serenity' got such a limited theatrical release I would have had to go all the way to London to see it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Firefly fan, but no film is worth going all the way up there!

If they can overcome that and give it some good promotion, a respectable release and maybe an ARG to get the geek fanbase all hyped up, then it should do OK. I mean it's never going to do 'Avatar' money but unless it opens next to some very stiff competition then I'd like to think it can at least turn a profit.

 

Yeah, the lack of publicity pretty much sunk 'John Carter', too. Hated that.

What's an ARG?

Jan