River mentions Serenity plot during the series? ~mild spoilers~

POSTED BY: jossismyboss
UPDATED: Saturday, March 11, 2006 01:29
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HARTMEISTER

Saturday, October 29, 2005 2:16 AM

I'm a little confused by all this. In a movie for the fans, Joss changes the over-arching plot of the entire series? Many on this board have complained that the reason why Serenity doesn't play as good as a movie as many would like is that Joss crammed too much of what he wanted in the second year of the Firefly into the Serenity movie.

I LOVE Firefly but I still think that Serenity would have been better if:

1) The pilot episode was adapted for the big screen. It would have been cheaper (after all much of it would have already been shot already). What would it cost to make the pilot episode a theatrical movie. Probably only a couple million more rather than the $35-40M that Serenity had cost. Assuming the same amount of Browncoat support, and with the same amount spent on marketing the movie would have been cash positive in the second week of US distribution alone.

2) The movie was just a long heist or con job. Think of a science fiction version of "The Sting" or "Maverick"

Am I the only one that believes that "The Movie" will replace "Day One" as the number two Jump The Shark ( http://tinyurl.com/apvuh ) category? Anyhow

Quote:
Originally posted by benshahn:

Personally, I find that comical, since in one of the intros in Finding Serenity ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932100431/103-3411237-9653439?v=glan
ce&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance), Jane Espenson specifically says that the origin of the Reavers in the movie is not the origin that was planned for the series. Joss had to change it to fit the medium.

Now that doesn't mean that the line he's refering to doesn't still work! I'm just pointing out how Joss will take something he hadn't planned and turn it into something useful and impressive. I personally think that's very shiny, and do my best to emulate that in my RPGs.

Rabit

Yeah, Joss has basically said he took just the outline of River's story from the series and used it for the movie. In the series, her secret is that Blue Sun runs the government and as such is responsible for what happened to her. In the series the Reaver origin probably relates to Mal's dark past, something from the war (examples from the series: Mal-bad-in the Latin, I haven't seen that kind of torture since the war, nothing worse than a monster thinks he's right with god )

HARTMEISTER

Saturday, October 29, 2005 2:18 AM

I want to apologize to Rabit. I just did the quote feature and it came out with your sig and did not quote right. Sorry...

UNSARDONIC

Saturday, October 29, 2005 2:37 AM

What would it cost to make the pilot episode a theatrical movie. Probably only a couple million more rather than the $35-40M that Serenity had cost.

--------------------------

Well, that can't be right as it's already been published that, although the producers had hoped it would be a cost-cutting measure to reuse the old sets & props, those all had been destroyed or lost & had to be rebuilt from the ground up. And, to make matters worse, there were no records of those sets: they actually rebuilt the Serenity rooms using a DVD of "Firefly" to try to imagine what the spaces had originally been... and then improve on them.

So the fact that this was done for ONLY $39M dollars... it's FREAKIN' MINDBLOWING!!!! A True Revelation!!! There should be a new Oscar® category for "Most Unbelievably Economical Special Effects" and not NUTHIN' would come close to what was accomplished by Joss and his "Serenity" crew.

Check out the October 9, 2005 Los Angeles Times article called "Downhome Directing" which is a 3-page article on how Joss/Crew did it. I'd include a link, but the Times has already archived it, requiring you to pay them a few bucks to find it

HARTMEISTER

Saturday, October 29, 2005 4:05 AM

Unsardonic,

I apologize. It would take much more than a couple million. The question is how much.

If a major film is being created the number one cost is the time from when they shooting starts from the time it has ended. I'm sure the sets costs a pretty penny, but I'm sure it was absolutely dwarfed by the general production cost that goes on in any Hollywood film produced for a major studio (indie films are quite cheaper because they often do not use union labor, shooting in 16mm vs 35mm, etc). When you read the interview with Joss you see that the number one way he was able to reduce the cost of Serenity is that he was able to compress the shooting time a ridulous amount. I know this isn't exact (there is a fixed cost and a variable cost to every movie) but if you have the DVD of the series handy check out what the pilot's time length handy (I do not have DVD's handy myself). If you don't we could guess it, with the TV average is non-commerical programming is 43:17 per hour of TV. If we double that the pilot episode 1:23:34. So if Joss wanted to create a movie length pilot episode, he would need add 35:23 of content to enlarge the length.

If you take $39M / 119 minutes we get an operating cost of $327,731 per minute. So in movie terms it would cost $11,596,218 to add the additional footage. I've heard that the total cost of the movie was a few million so let's add $2 million to that figure and we have $13,596,218. The movie would have broken even in the US on its second week, not including the sales of the "new" Serenity movie.

Now that is a very rough estimate, because obviously some of the special effects from the pilot movie would have to upgraded and the fixed cost of the recreation of the Serenity sets is not included. At the same time, if you were just adding footage a convential movie would not be created so probably would be many fixed costs that not exist.

Now if anybody has a minute here is another question. Was the deleted scene of Zoe telling Tam what happened during the battle of Serenity in the pilot episode or was that some other episode? I think it was the pilot but I'm not sure. I think that deleted scene was roughly five minutes long but since I don't know I won't include it in my new estimate.

Quote:
Originally posted by Unsardonic:

What would it cost to make the pilot episode a theatrical movie. Probably only a couple million more rather than the $35-40M that Serenity had cost.

--------------------------

Well, that can't be right as it's already been published that, although the producers had hoped it would be a cost-cutting measure to reuse the old sets & props, those all had been destroyed or lost & had to be rebuilt from the ground up. And, to make matters worse, there were no records of those sets: they actually rebuilt the Serenity rooms using a DVD of "Firefly" to try to imagine what the spaces had originally been... and then improve on them.

So the fact that this was done for ONLY $39M dollars... it's FREAKIN' MINDBLOWING!!!! A True Revelation!!! There should be a new Oscar® category for "Most Unbelievably Economical Special Effects" and not NUTHIN' would come close to what was accomplished by Joss and his "Serenity" crew.

Check out the October 9, 2005 Los Angeles Times article called "Downhome Directing" which is a 3-page article on how Joss/Crew did it. I'd include a link, but the Times has already archived it, requiring you to pay them a few bucks to find it

CYBERSNARK

Saturday, October 29, 2005 4:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Unsardonic:
There should be a new Oscar® category for "Most Unbelievably Economical Special Effects" and not NUTHIN' would come close to what was accomplished by Joss and his "Serenity" crew.

Amen.

Seriously, Serenity's FX are orders of magnitude more realistic and impressive than those of the Star Wars prequels, done at a fraction of the cost.

It's nothing less than a crime that cost/efficiency is almost completely ignored in the few awards that do consider special effects (and don't just lump them in as addendums to the "best picture" or "best director" categories).

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

RABBIT2

Saturday, October 29, 2005 4:31 PM

Quote:
Was the deleted scene of Zoe telling Tam what happened during the battle of Serenity in the pilot episode or was that some other episode? I think it was the pilot but I'm not sure.

Yes it was deleted from the pilot. The running time is about five minutes as well.

DERANGEDMILK

Saturday, October 29, 2005 4:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Rabit:
Personally, I find that comical, since in one of the intros in Finding Serenity ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932100431/103-3411237-9653439?v=glan
ce&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance), Jane Espenson specifically says that the origin of the Reavers in the movie is not the origin that was planned for the series. Joss had to change it to fit the medium.

Now that doesn't mean that the line he's refering to doesn't still work! I'm just pointing out how Joss will take something he hadn't planned and turn it into something useful and impressive. I personally think that's very shiny, and do my best to emulate that in my RPGs.

Rabit

Thats wierd. I know I read an interview with Joss the other day asking if he had this plot(that of the alliance creating the reavers) in mind all during the series and he said not at its original conception but after just a few episodes he came up with it and made it fit from them on out.
-e

"Storms getting worse."
"We'll pass through it soon enough."

SEP7IMUS

Saturday, October 29, 2005 5:45 PM

I think it's fair to say that the movie IS what Joss originally intended for the Reavers. I think it's also fair to say that it's not.

Most likely, it would have turned out that the Reavers were created by the Alliance, which is what happened in the movie. Probably, though, it would have been more involved, more convoluted, and would probably connect to some other intersting stuff in the 'verse like Blue Sun.

So, yeah, this is what Joss had in mind, but also it's not.

DRAGONWINE

Saturday, October 29, 2005 6:32 PM

I think Blue Sun is the corp that either did the teraform or at least supplied the pax. And Blue Sun has it's own "operatives" after River. The "Blue Hand" guys, probably for some completely other reason.
Now if we only knew what exactly was in the syringe that Inara had when the Reavers showed in the tv pilot. Doesn't make sense to be a cure for Reavers.
If parliament ,and perhaps Blue Sun, knew how to make a Reaver, then they could make some in a lab setting and experiment away.
Of course you would need "volunteers".... got a ship full of people you don't like, or that no one will miss, have your stormtroopers haul em away make it look like reavers, and then leak a story that it is rumored to maybe have been Reavers but no such proof exists...etc. Your Alliance taxes at work.

It's a nothing part til you don't got one, then you have to go to ebay.....aaaaagh!

HARTMEISTER

Saturday, October 29, 2005 8:21 PM

I'm coming to the conclusion that Joss didn't deviate as much as I thought. Just think that although there are many references to the goverment doing things, they may also just be Blue Sun projects just dressed up to look like the government was doing it. Certainly cleans up red tape to think that everybody is a goverment employee when they might actually be Blue Sun. Joss may have just not wanted to get in all that because it would be too confusing for the audience. The build up all during the series was about Blue Sun which is equivalent to finding out that Procter & Gamble really run the government, but no one who was not a Browncoat would get that.

I think Inara's syringe was simply poison. Still unexplained (even from the movie) is Mal's knowledge of the Reavers. Assuming the Reavers were the unintended side-effect of the planet at the end of Serenity, River may have been designed as a Reaver killer. Assuming this was all a Blue Sun plot, Blue Sun wanted the Reavers killed so they could eventually eliminate all signs of the failed terraforming project (bad publicity).

You could see then that the control of the government by Blue Sun is not absolute. When government officials realize that River might know of the government complicity with the failed terraforming project they decide to send the Operative to clean up the mess, not trusting Blue Sun to do it with them.

On a side thing do we think that Blue Sun actually started the war, too? I've always thought there might have been some new company on the non-allied planets that represented a strategic threat to Blue Sun and the war was just a simple excuse to destroy it. Just something to think about...

Quote:
Originally posted by dragonwine:
I think Blue Sun is the corp that either did the teraform or at least supplied the pax. And Blue Sun has it's own "operatives" after River. The "Blue Hand" guys, probably for some completely other reason.
Now if we only knew what exactly was in the syringe that Inara had when the Reavers showed in the tv pilot. Doesn't make sense to be a cure for Reavers.
If parliament ,and perhaps Blue Sun, knew how to make a Reaver, then they could make some in a lab setting and experiment away.
Of course you would need "volunteers".... got a ship full of people you don't like, or that no one will miss, have your stormtroopers haul em away make it look like reavers, and then leak a story that it is rumored to maybe have been Reavers but no such proof exists...etc. Your Alliance taxes at work.

It's a nothing part til you don't got one, then you have to go to ebay.....aaaaagh!

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