"Firefly" still lives on in the hearts of millions of Browncoats, but even after the success of the "Veronica Mars" Kickstarter campaign and the blockbuster performance of Joss Whedon's take on "The Avengers," Nathan Fillion doesn't think you should hold your breath for a "Serenity" sequel on the big or small screen.
"That was a project that lived for so short a time and such a long time ago that I would look at that as an impossibility," Fillion told HitFix of the franchise's chances of revival. "Joss Whedon made a movie of it, something I also considered an impossibility, so I look at that and say 'where is the hope?' but knowing Joss Whedon, I try not to underestimate that man."
In a February interview with The Huffington Post, Fillion sounded similarly skeptical about the stars aligning for more "Firefly," but admitted that he would jump at the chance. "We talk about it, we dream about it. I don't think you could find a cast member, a writer, a director, any of the crew who'd say, 'No, I'm out,'" he told us. "People are pretty busy right now, Alan [Tudyk] is always working, and obviously Joss is pretty busy. But that would be something that I would do again in a heartbeat. There's something about 'Firefly' -- it was my first love. So if you get a chance to go back to your very first love, you'll do it, right?"
Back in 2011, Fillion set virtual tongues wagging across the internet after telling EW, "If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to 'Firefly,' make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet." Naturally, given the show's rabid fanbase, this launched a campaign to help Fillion buy the rights, but given that it was a time pre-Kickstarter, the project fizzled out.
Whedon echoed Fillion's sentiments in an interview with BuzzFeed after the "Veronica Mars" Kickstarter reached its goal (and then some). "I’ve said repeatedly that I would love to make another movie with these guys, and that remains the case. It also remains the case that I’m booked up by Marvel for the next three years, and that I haven’t even been able to get 'Dr. Horrible 2' off the ground because of that. So I don’t even entertain the notion of entertaining the notion of doing this, and won’t. Couple years from now, when Nathan [Fillion]’s no longer [on] 'Castle' and I’m no longer the Tom Hagen of the Marvel Universe and making a giant movie, we might look and see where the market is then. But right now, it’s a complete non-Kickstarter for me," he said.
Don't expect Netflix to step in with the cash, either. Despite the site's resurrection of "Arrested Development," Netflix chief Ted Sarandos recently pointed out, 'In almost every case the cult around the show gets more intense and smaller as time goes by. 'Arrested Development' was the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was cancelled. The 'Firefly' fan is still the 'Firefly' fan from when it was on TV and there’s fewer of them and they’re more passionate every year. Whereas with 'Arrested Development' we’re going to be serving a multiple of the original audience. Any of the other shows we could bring back would be a fraction of the original audience."
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