A Deadwood Movie’s Been Greenlit, Twelve Years On

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When HBO’s Deadwood was cancelled after its third season in 2006, there was plenty of mourning. The frontier drama had garnered a reputation as one of the best shows, period, scooping up eight Emmy awards over its comparatively brief run – with Ian McShane’s foul-mouthed saloon owner Al Swearengen receiving particular acclaim.

Now, twelve years later, there’s finally going to be some closure. Just as disappointed fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly were mollified by the release of Serenity in 2005, HBO have greenlit a Deadwood film to wrap things up once and for all – or maybe, just maybe, rekindle the franchise.

There had been talk of film adaptations ever since the series was cancelled, but it was only in 2015 that creator David Milch and HBO started talking seriously about it. Milch produced a script, and HBO programming president Casey Bloys was unrestrained in his praise, saying “I wanted a script that would stand on its own…David totally delivered on that. It’s a terrific script” when asked about the future of the Deadwood film in 2017.

It may have taken a while, but HBO have finally given the project the go-ahead. Filming is tentatively scheduled to begin in October, with a view to releasing the film in early 2019 – although this is still very much up in the air.

While many members of Deadwood’s hefty ensemble cast are now much bigger names than they were at the time – e.g. Timothy Olyphant (Live Free Or Die Hard) and Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) – Bloys’s comments indicate that, although it was “a logistics nightmare” to organise, most if not all of the classic roster will be returning.

Although Serenity didn’t live up to expectations at the box office, the fan and critical responses were overwhelmingly positive. This can only bode well for the Deadwood film, given that the fans have been eagerly awaiting – or desperately hoping for – any development for over a decade now. Compare this year’s release of Pixar’s The Incredibles II after a fourteen-year wait – by that point, it was able to trade on the nostalgia value of those who had watched the original as much younger people, and it reaped rich rewards for it, currently standing comfortably within the top five highest-grossing films of 2018.

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