Serenity's Future (if any)

[selenite0]

CHUD sums up the box office story for Serenity. I don't see much in there to disagree with, other than the percentage of Browncoats getting ridiculous in their promotion efforts. So it doesn't bode well for Joss getting theatrical sequels. Other kind of sequels will depend on how the entertainment business is changing.

I've been looking at the various promotional efforts for Serenity as a experiment by Universal to see what the marketing people can do if they're turned loose. They had a good movie to experiment with--built in core audience to spread word of mouth, and a favorable reaction from critics. But it didn't get a huge opening, and it didn't get lots of people coming from word of mouth recommendations. For executives afraid that word of mouth driven hits are gone forever this may be the proof. Box office revenue is already shrinking, so at some point it won't make sense to do a theatrical release instead of going straight to DVD.

There's already plenty of direct-to-video movies, but they're bad. This is the fate of movies too good or expensive to be just thrown away, but not worth trying to promote for the theatre. Even ones originally intended for DTV are done poorly, since no one seems to feel it justifies their best work. But if DTV becomes the main profit sector for the studios that'll have to change.

So if Universal is going to ahead to the future of the business, it'll have to do some experiments to figure out how to market high-quality DTV shows. Serenity seems ideally positioned to be a test case. They're measuring the appetite for DVDs (as opposed to theatre showings) with a December release. If that's a bigger hit than the movie was on the big screen, it'll look like a good opportunity for a DTV sequel. After Firefly was cancelled, some fans were pushing for a subscription DTV follow-on. That could be a good model for Serenity, getting some revenue up front to justify the investment in making new episodes.

I'd also like to see DTV for the freedom it gives artists. Right now movies and TV have very rigid constraints on the stories they can hold. TV has hard time limits and requires a climax or cliffhanger before each commercial break. Movies are more flexible but still force the story into continuous high gear (I think the non-book scenes in the LotR trilogy were mostly there to maintain the rising tension). With a DTV mini-series Joss could do stories at the Firefly pace, and let them include all the little touches that make us fans.

Comments

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

You left that first <a href=""> without an actual link, so LJ is assuming you mean to link to the reader's friends page. Kind of an interesting kink.

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

Oooh. No, it actually assumes you mean to link to whatever page you're viewing at the time. Even more interesting.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oops. Fixed, thanks.

[mycroftca.livejournal.com]

Well thought out.

Now if only the studio execs are thinking, instead of reacting...

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

Nah, word of mouth movies still work, just look at march of the penguins

I do think Firefly/serenity is a potential DVT case, but the budget for most of those things are 5-10 million, and Serenity cost 50 million to make, so we are back to making a very expensive TV show, which I don't think Universal is up for just yet

How do you think the subscription set up would be marketed and what fee range?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Has there been enough time for the "word of mouth" effect to take place? "March"'s momentum was fairly slow, and it's not as if there's much else out there to see...

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

There was plenty of word of mouth for Serenity, but it seems not to have helped.

There is still an ongoing campaign for Serenity, and it is possible that it will finish a bit better next week, but I don't see it.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Off the cuff--

One DVD with about four episodes on it (or one big movie, or whatever) every two months. Pay $15 + S&H for each one. So that's $90/yr for subscription. At ~$2 million an episode to make it you need over half a million subscribers to break even. So not that easy a deal. OTOH, it's cheaper than NetFlix and they have over 3 million subscribers, so it's possible.

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

Well, that sounds possible, based on the number of people who saw Serenity in the first two weeks.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Hmmm--one way to ease people in a bit more. Don't ask for the $90 up front. Get a credit card for a standing pre-order, and just charge for each DVD as it ships.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Somebody else's take on this option:
http://www.nymetro.com/nymetro/arts/tv/15038/

All of which leads to an enticing possibility: Let’s say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though “back to air” is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as “switching the dial.”) Let’s say he found a million Firefly fans online—and, trust me, they’re not hiding—who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon’s got roughly $40 million to play with—and he doesn’t need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to.