Serenity delayed by studios for 5 months (insert cursing in Chinese here)

[laurion]

As posted by Joss Whedon at http://whedonesque.com/?comments=5406#42832 , Serenity, the Firefly Movie has been delayed by 5 MONTHS to September 30th. Why? The studios seem to think there's going to be too much competition for the demographic in April. I think we got robbed. Looking at what the IMDB says is coming out in April (This isn't a complete list I'm sure, just what the IMDB can get) at http://www.imdb.com/nowplaying/2005/04 , I see _very_ few other flicks that catch my eye. *sigh* Haven't the fans been tortured enough?

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Comments

[taellosse.livejournal.com]

Well, while I in essence agree with you, I will point out that Star Wars Ep 3 is coming out about a month later, for one. for another, the Hitchhiker's Guide movie is releasing in May as well. I would imagine both of those overlap the Firefly demographic pretty heavily. Plus, within April itself, there's the Sin City movie coming out shortly before Serenity, and if I recall correctly, that's a comic book adaptation, so there is likely singificant overlap there as well.

Look at this way: if the movie does really well, which it is more likely to do with less competition, there is more liklihood of a sequel, or (say it softly, lest the gods take notice and dash our hopes out of perversity) maybe even the TV series getting relaunched. And those can only be good things, right?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Ooh -- now you've got me wondering if Disney or Lucas put some pressure on them to move Firefly away, so the incoming disasters those movies can quickly turn into aren't highlighted/shown up by the beauticiousness that Serenity could be.

Nah, that's just paranoid ravings. Right, George? Right, Walt? Guys?

[taellosse.livejournal.com]

I rather doubt anything like that happened. More likely its just as Joss said in the posting: the studio decided to minimize competition with Serenity by moving it to a different time so as to maximize sales.

Those other movies, especially Star Wars, don't NEED to be good to be huge successes. They already have massive fan bases committed to seeing them. Serenity, on the other hand, though it has a devoted following, is, at the moment, based off of a fan base that is essentially cult status. If it were significantly larger, Firefly would not have been cancelled in the first place.