I’m thrilled for Nathan Fillion (a.k.a. “Cap’n Tight Pants.” Not that I noticed, or anything, but I hear tell). Castle, the hip “Murder He Wrote” for ABC, has been picked up for a second season (via Wikipedia).
Jennifer and I just finished watching the final (tenth) episode of the first (replacement) season. The last episode illustrates why I like Fillion. He’s funny, yes. But he also has that hard, tense edge when he needs it. I also quite like Stana Katic, who portrays the cop with whom Fillion’s Rick Castle partners to solve crimes.
I like the show because Katic’s character is driven to find justice, yet the crimes often are shown to be what real crimes are: messy. Sometimes the perpetrators are a little sympathetic, and sometimes the victims weren’t so nice.
Okay, so now that Fillion is a big damn movie star (though he already had a fantastic TV show and two outstanding feature films to his credit, plus some other fun work), now that Summer Glau is a freakin’ terminator, now that Alan Tudyk is back working with Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, now that Whedon is obviously in his prime, it seems high time to get the crew together and finish making the Serenity movies.
I’ll review a few rules here for making the last two movies a success.
1. Film them both at once to save costs.
2. Don’t title them “Serenity,” which sounds like retired people fishing in a pond or something. Call it “Mal’s War” or something bad-ass. (“Serenity” can be in the subtitle.)
3. Run real ads, not those strange “cult following” ads that accompanied the first movie.
4. This is optional, but I like it. Whedon killed off two characters in the first film. Okay, I get it. But you can bring back these characters, say by having Tudyk appear in Zoe’s dreams (say, to tell her she’s pregnant), and having Book appear in a video recording addressed to Mal. Or something like that.
I sincerely believe that the next two Serenity films would make money. (Hell, I think you could re-release the first film and make more money off that.) I think there were some problems with the first film in terms of packaging and marketing that held back its sales, but that could be fixed for the next two films. Yes, scheduling conflicts and all that. But this is great art. And great art deserves commitment and funding. I believe the money will follow.
Give us Serenity parts II and III.