My friend suggested that they make a direct to video Season 2. I'd rather get that than a couple of direct to DVD movies.

I didn't see it in the theater but I still intend to rent it (perhaps buy it). I've never seen Firefly tho.

Definitely worth taking in at least a few episodes of Firefly first, Josh. Find a friend who has the DVDs and borrow them if you have to.

Actually, they've already announced that the DVD will be released on December 20th.

It is a shame that "Serenity" isn't as much of a box office success, as it was a filmmaking success. I can't get too upset about it, because it was a miracle that it even got made in the first place.

Having never seen the original series, I wasn't up to speed on the story - which made it a rental, not a ticket. But at least I knew what it was about; to anyone outside the target audience, it must have looked and sounded confusing. "Serenity" sounds a movie in which Shirley MacClaine sits in a rocker and argues, lovingly, with her spunky estranged daughter as they watch the sun set on Lake Serenity.

"Two-Fisted Space Pirates" might have worked.

The trailer didn't do much for me, either; the frail-&-silent-child-with-AMAZING-POWERS thing might have been more compelling if I'd known more about the show, but it all felt like I was coming in during the middle of one of those interminable gnarled anime plots. Not to say I won't see it, or that I doubt it's good; just didn't make me arrange for a babysitter on the spot.

... and James pretty much summed up what I figured most people's reactions would be.

For whatever it's worth, the series is worth either picking up on DVD (it's cheap) or Replay/Tivoing off SciFi, where it's currently being rerun.

How can more people not be watching this show at the movies --- it's excellent! And loads of fun to watch.

I think it was worth the ticket price just to see it on the big screen. Sometimes big is better.

Serenity is a bad title... Fire Fly is too... and the reason I never saw it on television was because of some vague notion that it was some New Age-ish psychic thingy... Shirly McClaine, indeed.

Call it Reavers, maybe. That might have worked for marketing. Maybe something with the word Battle in it?

The problem seems to be the same thing that makes it good. It's hard to quantify. What's it about anyway?

Maybe we could think up a *good* title and send it to Joss Whedon for next time.

How about, Gettin' Paid.

Thats too bad because it was probably the best Sci Fi show since Babylon 5.

Well, "Serenity" is going on my Christmas wish list along with the "Firefly" DVDs, that's certain.

I do hope there is at least something to follow up, a second season would be great. Maybe SciFi channel will do it?

If you had seen the show on TV (I saw them all at once on DVD), then the movie was an extra episode. The dialog mostly worked because you knew who all the characters were.

If you hadn't seen the show, I think the movie would just be another action picture, full of cardboard characters. The effects weren't that interesting, and without character development, the action wouldn't be very satisfying. I'm not surprised it had a limited run.

I hadn't seen any of the television episodes and while I'll agree that people who had got extra value, it was still a character show. No one was cardboard.

If it was a straight shoot 'em up, we wouldn't be here having this conversation.

Julie, I think Mal, River and Simon get a reasonable amount of screen time. The rest of the characters are pretty thin. Some of them only get a couple of lines! In the series, there are whole episodes for some of them.

The battle sequences are Star Trek level, as is the overall script. Not horrible, just not enough for an audience who hasn't seen the series.

The names (serenity and Firefly) really suck - I'm a huge sci fi fan but never saw the series due to lack of promotion and a dull name. Now seen about half the episodes on sci-fi, and have ordered the discs. The movie was good but a little too much crammed in, so the character development was weak. I already knew and liked the characters - my wife, a Firefly novice, found that she couldn't really get into them.

Still, Sci-Fi channel is doing really well with BSG - so they just might be ready to give this show another chance. They're showing it in reruns on Friday, which is good exposure due to the proximity to BSG ang SG-1.

Lileks: love the Bleat, love Screedblog, love the books, you are so going to kick yourself for not watching the television show earlier when you finally do.

But that's OK. It happened to a lot of people. Including me. :)

Moe

PS: I could live with a direct to DVD Season 2, although I think that the CGI would take a hit.

Because of certain events that occur in the film, I have no interest in seeing future films or episodes.

Um, Scott J..."Because of certain events..."

what the hell does that mean? Is that a vague compliment or a vague insult. Or are you just avoiding spoilers.

I agree that Firefly and Serenity are terrible titles. I totally missed Firefly when it was first run and I love Sci-fi and Joss. How the hell did Fox screw it up that bad?

Now watching Firefly on DVD. Yea, I like it. Quirky, certainly. I mean, its a western. No, wait, it's sci-fi. Um, no, it's about a sea voyage. Damn, there are more horses on Firefly than there are on Deadwood.

All in all, it was probably doomed from the start. It should have been on the Sci-Fi channel anyway, were it could have at least had a chance to develop.

And I just learn that Fox showed the episodes out of order. Tools.

"New eopisodes coming to the SCI-FI channel soon" is something I expect to hear in the next few months.

It wasn't exactly released at a good time.

And I wonder how many folks are like me: intrigued, but fear getting hooked on something that won't survive (which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Also, I rarely go to the movies.

I do not expect new episodes coming to Sci Fi, or anywhere else...sadly. I think the movie mined the Firefly vein as deeply and thoroughly as Joss Whedon planned to.

What I'd really like to see is a Buffy feature film, but I don't expect that to ever happen.

I was surprised to learn that James Lileks isn't hip to the whole Firefly scene. I assume, from that, that he's equally unfamiliar with the Whedonverse of Buffy and Angel. If so, I recommend that he buy Buffy Season One on dvd forthwith. Much, much televisual enjoyment awaits!

In spite of "certain events" I'll be more than eager to view any more Firelfy, should it appear.

I missed most of Firefly on TV. Fox rarely broadcast two episodes in a row without pre-empting it for a month. I think it was on Fridays, which is a busy evening anyway.

My biggest question about Whedon now is "What's next?" I've never been disappointed by him, and hope he gets involved with episodic TV again soon.

Sadly, I am not surprised the movie hasn't done better at the box office. I was a huge fan of the series and eagerly anticipated the movie. Half an hour into the movie it struck me that Serenity was never intended to reach a broad audience. Rather, it was a lovingly crafted eulogy for the series. Whedon gave us fans an amazing "thank you" in Serenity, how he ever convinced Universal to give him $39 million to do it is beyond me. I'd love to see more of this 'verse either as films or a continuation of the series, but I suspect Whedon knew that wasn't going to happen and that's why we got the movie we did. Kudos to Whedon and shame on Lileks for not seeing the series (and B5) sooner.

I'm confident that "Serenity" will do well on the DVD sales and rentals. I'm also hearing that it's currently doing well overseas, particularly in the U.K.

Being a big fan of both the TV show and movie, I am disappointed it didn't do a *little* better on box-office revenues. But as mentioned above, there were some questionable marketing strategies given that the show had a cult following and needed a bit of a mainstream paint job to get more bodies in the seats.

Much like the other Whedonverse properties, "Firefly/Serenity" is extremely smart and well-crafted. It's audience will continue to grow, and word-of-mouth should bring in considerable post-box-office bucks.

I keep reading about how I, never having seen Firefly, was supposed to be confused by Serenity. For the record Serenity was not the least bit confusing. It was a straight up sci-fi western with a sense of humor, lots of satisfying explosions and - unlooked for but quite gratifying - a strongly anti-socialist message. I saw it twice. More, please.

You know, in all the talk about what went wrong — it had a bad title, it was released at a bad time, audiences were confused by the story — it seems like too few people are talking about the real problem with "Serenity."

It wasn't a very good movie.

The plot was thin as tissue paper. The movie had easily twice as many, and maybe three times as many, characters as it should have had, and the supporting characters were flimsy sketches. The "Reavers," as a plot device, were standard zombie-movie fare, but for an audience looking for something more interesting, they just didn't work.

If "Serenity" had been a two-part episode of "Firefly," it would have been by far the weakest episode of the series run.

Has anyone ever been as consistently wrong as Jeff Harrell?

Battlestar Galactica is working for Sci-Fi, and they are still cranking out mediocre but somewhat entertaining "Stargate" eps. How can they not want to pick up Firefly? Unless, of course, Whedon has no interest in doing a cable show.

From what I have read (i.e: I can't remember where the link is, to lazy to find it) Fox still owns the rights to Serenity and (for now) will not relenquish it. Whedon doesn't want to work with Fox after how they treated the show so don't expect a "Family Guy" style of return.

My hope is that somehow the Sci-Fi channel can talk some sense into Fox and get the rights to the show.

Fox bastards! My husband saw the pilot episode then saw the movie. He was hooked and he does not hook easily. He is a gamer and the only TV he watches is sports related, so when he wanted to watch all the episodes aftr the movie, I knew it was special. I want a sequel, I needs it!

What I'd really like to see is a Buffy feature film, but I don't expect that to ever happen.

Been there, done that, it was great fun.

Not that Buffy. The real one.

The real fictional one, that is. The one we've come to know and love.

The original movie was okay, but just okay. The series...the series was a work of genius.

I watched Firefly on Fox and liked the series despite the egregiously bad astronomy. Good characters and fun dialog. HOWEVER, I've found the re-runs on scifi unwatchable which has cooled my desire to see Serenity. I'll rent the DVD.

At the very start of Serenity I had to laugh out loud... maybe the second statement in the whole movie was "It took decades to terraform all the worlds." Later, I decided it was a brilliant (if still funny) way to stay up front... don't even *think* of disecting the astro-physics, that's not what this is about.

*say* up front. argh.

Belated Serenity Review -- A regrettable lack of nekkid teenage lezbeen witches.

We have to give up the notion that Joss had the slightest idea of this movie as a science fiction movie. Having gone to the trouble of establishing that humanity emigrated from the ruined Earth to a whole new pinball-machine solar system with moons and planets bouncing off each other like a free ball off the bonus points bumper, he then proceeds to use “solar system” and “galaxy” interchangably throughout the picture.

Excellent dialogue and character turns as always; those are Joss’s strengths. Kayleigh doesn’t get many lines, but they score, Jayne is a hoot, and Morena Baccarini as Inara is always fun when circumstances shock her out of her artificial Companion’s poise.

And then there is the amazing con game Joss tries to run past us:

Did anybody notice that this movie was not actually about anything? Oh, sure, River has her little flashback speech about “they don’t like us because we meddle,” (but that covers everyone from Rome to the Ottomans to the British in India). And the creepy teacher has all her pious, superficial little platitudes (you can hear the exact same thing every day in elementary schools and on PBS kids’ programming), but we learn nothing at all about what the Alliance actually believes in. Ooh, dear, they believe they can “make people better”… but that covers everybody from Lenin to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yes, they employ ruthless agents, and win wars against nice space cowboys. So did Abraham Lincoln. We have no idea whether the nice space cowboys are being oppressed by the future descendants of the Moral Majority or the folks who believe “it takes a village to inform on your neighbor.” For that matter, we don’t even know what the nice space cowboys want to be left alone to do.

And it wouldn’t matter, for the story, which Joss might have chosen, as long as he chose something. Right now the moral of the story is basically, “Mean People Suck!”, which seems a bit lightweight to expect an $80 million gross off. And while it’s entertaining as anything to scoot around the review columns and the blogs and see what folks are projecting onto this tabula rasa, it doesn’t compensate for the fact that the slate is, nevertheless, pretty much blank.

And that blankness hurts the story. The assassin is a villain because he is a “believer” in some sort of unspecified better world. But Mal only becomes a hero, in the story’s terms, when he learns to believe… in some sort of unspecified better world. The Operative and his mystery culture have committed horrible crimes. Mal has committed horrible crimes. Of course, the Operative is a utopian sociopath, while Mal is a perfectly sane and reasonable fellow. Floating around committing felonies in a spaceship with no idea where he is actually going, who hardly ever kicks prisoners into engine intakes and psychologically incapable of abandoning his ship even when it is dead in space…

I think this even influenced the killing of Shepherd Book. Much easier to bump off the only character who is all about belief than to clarify what he actually believes in.