Futurama Movie

I'm new to this group having just learned about it in the commentary track to the Luck of the Fry-rish episode of Season 3 but I wanted to suggest something I have been thinking about ever since Futurama went off the air, which may have been suggested before but like I said I'm new so I don't know.

Anyways, here goes...

For years now people have been talking about a Simpsons movie (which in my personal opinion should never be made because the writers have lost track of the warmth that once made the characters and storylines so heartfelt and true as opposed to the series of fart jokes and lame/repetitive pop culture references the show has become) but I think Futurama would lend itself much better to being a movie. There are so many places they could take it. I mean throwaway lines from the series about worlds they visited but we didn't see could be storylines for movies. I really think Matt Groening should consider proposing this to Fox. A 70-80 minute Futurama movie with perhaps a Simpsons or Itchy and Scratchy short packaged with it to be shown before the movie wouldn't be particularly expensive to produce and would certainly gross well and sell very very well on DVD. It would be a way to extend a great series and appease fans who had it ripped away from them too early!

RoughRiders no20 wrote:

If they can make a Jetsons movie years after the fact, and go so far as to replace Janet Waldo with Tiffany as Judy in order to get more teenagers to go see it, they can make a Simpsons movie whenever they want.

Excuse me? "The Wild Thornberrys Movie" cost $40 million, as I recall, and it wouldn't involve nearly as much 3-D animation as a Futurama movie would.

Do the TV episodes sell "very very well" on DVD? Unfortuantely, apparently not, as otherwise the TV series might very well have been brought back, the way "Family Guy" was.

You also have to remember that the "early" cancellation of the series was a blessing in disguise to fans in the USA - otherwise, it might have ended up going into nationwide syndication, which means we would still be waiting for Season 1 to appear on DVD (while the rest of the world had the complete series) - remember, "King of the Hill", a series that, for a time, actually got higher ratings than "The Simpsons" on TV, has only been released through its second season on DVD.

-- Don

I never said that they cant. I just said it would be a bad idea.

I don't know where you got that figure but I'm guessing 3-4 times what an episode costs to do a movie based on how much longer it would have to be. I don't know what other expenses would be involved aside from distribution but distribution is a different aspect that isn't taken into account under production costs anyway. Doing one movie would certainly be cheaper than doing another season of the show.

Wrong! Shows go into syndication after 4 years as long as the studio can find an outlet for them. Futurama followed the traditional path to syndication. That entire system is being changed though with the advent of DVD. We see plenty of shows being released on DVD long before they make it to syndication (CSI, 24, Alias, Arrested Development, Malcolm in the Middle, etc...) so there is absolutely no reason to believe that if Futurama had stayed on the air it wouldn't have been released on DVD. Besides the first season was released on DVD in March 2003, before the decision had come down from Fox that the series had been cancelled.