The bad news for fans eagerly anticipating the live action "Star Wars" series is that not much has changed since word broke last June that the massive production is currently on hold, awaiting costs to drop to a point that will make the FX-heavy undertaking financially feasible. Producer Rick McCallum is hoping that won't be too far off, however, and today told IGN that the show even has a working title: "Star Wars: Underworld."
"It's underneath what's going on," he reiterated about the series' focus, "It's the criminals and the gangs. The guys who are running Wall Street, basically. The guys who are running the United States."
Even if the series is a few more years away, McCallum says there's no risk in the scripts become dating and that the delay can only make the show stronger.
"They're timeless," he explains. "They take place between Episode III and Episode IV. That 20 year period when Luke is growing up. It's not about Luke, but it's about that period when the Empire is trying to take things [over]."
Long ago in a galaxy far away, the Lycans fought the Vampires, and Kate Beckinsale used the force, and midichlorians didn't exist. Coming soon to a tv near you!
Never gonna happen and if it does, it'll helluva time trying to look like it actually fits in the live action universe.
Oh, I think it will do. 50 scripts have already been written, the only thing in the way is the budget.
I can only guess Lucas will want to finish The Clone Wars first before properly starting Underworld. With the way things are going it's looking like The Clone Wars may come to an end soon and that can only mean good things for Underworld. Having said that though, with $5 million per episode I don't know why that's not enough. Plenty of shows make do with far less than that per episode.
This could turn out to be actually pretty darn good, and if it does Lucas may have redeemed himself. I just hope all the Lucas haters out there will look at this a potentially great stuff, before judging it before they've seen it simply because Lucas is involved.
Long ago in a galaxy far away, the Lycans fought the Vampires, and Kate Beckinsale used the force, and midichlorians didn't exist. Coming soon to a tv near you!
The action will follow the Rebel Alliance as it slowly gains strength against the Empire. There will be Stormtroopers, but no Jedi or Darth Vader will appear on screen.
"A wealthy industrialist family of Coruscant knows trouble as their daughter seems to be tied to the growing rebellion, while we follow the struggles of a farming family of Corellia, who seems to have some ties to the powerful Hutt mafia based on Tatooine, but whose son is dreaming of getting away from the farm and the shady deals..."
Rick McCallum Talks Tone and Logistics of Live-Action STAR WARS TV Series; Describes it as “EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on Steroids”
Everybody knows the name George Lucas. Whether you love or hate the guy, his name is instantly recognizable and sends off the first few notes of John Williams’ Star Wars score in your head. Another name you may or may not know is Rick McCallum. McCallum’s relationship with Lucas began on the early 1990s TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, after which Lucas tapped McCallum to produce the three Star Wars prequels. Steve recently talked with McCallum to discuss the World War II action-adventure pic Red Tails (which Lucas and McCallum produced), and while we’ll have the full interview up closer to the film’s release, we wanted to share a few tidbits with you today.
McCallum talked at length about the long-in-the-works live-action Star Wars TV series, discussing the show’s tone, the logistics of doing an effects-heavy series on television, how soon the show might come to fruition, and a lot more.
The budget issues on the live-action TV series (working title Star Wars: Underworld) are well-documented. The difficulty of getting great-looking visual effects done on a television budget is the chief sticking point standing in the way of production:
Quote:
“This is the best way to put it into perspective: we did Episode III—which is one of the larger of all the Star Wars films in relation to set construction, visual effects, the amount of visual effects and everything else—and that was made for $100 million which was unheard of even five years ago, because had it been made by any studio or anywhere in the United States it would have been easily double that price. So imagine an hour’s episode with more digital animation and more visual effects and more complicated in terms of set design and costume design than a two-hour movie that takes us three years to make, and we have to do that every week and we only have $5 million to do it. That’s our challenge.”
So how close are they to overcoming the challenge? Let’s just say don’t expect to see Star Wars on any network schedules this fall:
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“It’s not a challenge that I think can be dealt with in the next year or two years, I think it’s gonna be a little bit more longer term goal.”
McCallum said that one of the most expensive aspects of the series is the CG characters:
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“[George has] come up with so many extraordinary digital characters that are onscreen for 30-40 minutes. Most people who love movies and kind of understand the process realize that if you do a character like Gollum or Jar Jar or any major digital character, that costs twice as much as having Tom Cruise in a movie. You get 150 people working for two years on a 40 minute performance and they all make serious money, you just add it up; that’s gonna be a serious $20-30 million character. That’s our problem, how do we get that down?”
The producer went on to lay out the other specific issues they’re trying to overcome, including the overwhelming number of virtual sets that are needed:
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“[With] digital 3D matte paintings, how do we cut the time from 2-3 weeks to 2-3 days? On a television budget, on television screens it doesn’t have to be film res, but each one of these are major challenges for us. How do we get virtual set software? Because we can’t build any of this stuff. I mean we could do it if we did it in a traditional format where we have one set with all the characters, but George doesn’t work that way. We have 40-50 set pieces per hour, every minute and a half to two minutes there’s another set. Well we can’t build that and do that every week, that’s virtually impossible, so we have to come up with virtual set software and an environment that allows us to be able to do that on blue and green screen and be able to turn those backgrounds around really, really fast. We’re getting there, but it’s not perfect yet and it’s still too expensive.”
While production is still a ways off, over 50 scripts have already been banked for the show once it gets the go-ahead. Regarding the tone, McCallum revealed that it’s actually quite a bit darker than the film series:
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“It’s much darker [than the movies]. It’s a much more adult series. I think, thematically, in terms of characters and what they go through, it will be…if we can ever get it together and George really wants to pursue it, it’ll be the most awesome part of the whole franchise, personally…It’s Empire Strikes Back on steroids.”
McCallum said that they originally envisioned the series as “Deadwood in space,” so it’s easy to see where that darker tone comes from. The producer elaborated on the Deadwood comparison, conceding that we won’t necessarily see any Jedi throwing around the word “f**k”:
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“Obviously, we changed it for where we couldn’t go in terms of language. It was to be serious performances, very complicated relationships, unbelievable issues of power and corruption, greed, vanity, pride, ego manifesting itself at levels that only equal the world that we live in now, but, as I said, on steroids.”
So while we’ll have to wait quite a while for the live-action Star Wars series, it certainly sounds like it’ll be one of the most ambitious feats of TV storytelling ever attempted. Keep an eye out for Steve’s full interview with McCallum which is chock-full of information on Red Tails, the future of visual effects, and George Lucas’ filmmaking plans in the years ahead.
He's so damn reliant on CGI. Here's an idea: Have ACTUAL actors and ACTUAL sets. Then you could have an ACTUAL TV show instead of just talking about it for years and years.
Indeed, If they could make Battlestar Galactica, they should be able to make a star wars show. Sure, Star Wars has all kind of aliens and bizarre creatures, but just make them like the old trilogy (actors in suits) and not as cgi pixar figures.
And make it more starship based and not too much on crazy ice or lava planets. That should keep the effects budget down. Too much cgi can look like crap in a tv series, look at Terra Nova or the V remake
He's so damn reliant on CGI. Here's an idea: Have ACTUAL actors and ACTUAL sets. Then you could have an ACTUAL TV show instead of just talking about it for years and years.
+1
The beloved Original Trilogy, at least the unaltered version, has virtually no CGI in it.
I only wanted one thing from Lucas....SW on blu. I got it, and, even though they've been tweaked to hell and back, I'm relatively satisfied.
I couldn't/didn't get into Clone Wars at all....for one thing, the animation is horrid in style (to me), and I just can't get past that.
That said, I have zero interest in seeing him expand the SW universe, when it seems he barely has self-control over altering the original trilogy, and the prequels.
NOTE TO GEORGE (like he'll see it, LOL): Enough is enough, George. I'm not buying anything else from you except for the original unaltered trilogy, should it ever be released. Other than that, I have no interest.
Before anyone chastises me for this, let me speak my peace:
I think the original poster for this topic has their facts messed up. From what I recall, George Lucas put the Star Wars live-action television series on hold in early 2011 because the production costs were too high for this series. He had indicated that until production for the television series (for the special effects) could be done in a cost effective manner, that the series would be on hold.
This information is not new for 2012.
Matter of fact, this was reported as far back as June 2011. Here's an article from Slashfilm:
The TV series is on hold, but that has nothing to do with the Czech Republic; it has to do with [the episodes being] so ambitious… We have 50 hours of third-draft scripts, but the problem we have is there is a lot of digital animation; we don’t have the technology yet to be able to do them at a price that is safe for television. Since we would be financing them, it would be suicide for us to do this [now]. So we are going to wait three or four years.
Inside news (per aintitcool.com) just said that the series' first episodes will involve a group of bandits acquiring the capability of time travel, and using it to travel back in time to stop Darth Vader from ever existing.
Sounds stupid. I wish they could just go back in time to prevent the prequels from every existing.
Rumor About Upcoming 'Star Wars' Series; Potentially Game Changing If True
A very interesting rumor is floating around the Internet today in regards to the eventual Star Wars TV show we now refer to as Star Wars: Underworld. If true, it would be considered not only a massive spoiler, but the kind of thing that changes Star Wars as we know it. It involves time travel. However, it’s important to remember that even if this information came from George Lucas himself (it doesn’t), we wouldn’t see it happen for several years at least.
With that said, it’s a doozy.
The rumor first popped up on Ain’t It Cool News. They stress it’s from a new and unproven source, but someone who did have “reasonable context.” So take that for what it’s worth.
Here’s the quote. Again, major spoilers for something that could be over a decade from realization.
Quote:
[Show spoiler]One of the series’ first episodes will involve a group of bandits acquiring the capability of time travel, and using it to travel back in time to stop Darth Vader from ever existing.
Whoa. So what could that possibly mean?
It’s important to remember
[Show spoiler]Darth Vader is different from Anakin Skywalker. If Darth Vader doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean his kids don’t exist. Luke and Leia would, presumably, still be born. They might just grow up with a strong parental unit.
That’s assuming the story is true. Here’s an argument for why this would be false. Everyone who has ever spoken about the show has said that it’s a dark show about the seedy underbelly of the galaxy. Rick McCallum even called it “Empire Strikes Back on Steroids.” Now, we’ve all seen The Phantom Menace. Before the Empire, the Star Wars universe wasn’t a very seedy place. There were pockets (Tatooine) but for the most part, it was fairly pristine. Only the rise of power personified in the existence of Darth Vader made the universe into a place where bounty hunters and smugglers ran rampant.
Then again, the rumor doesn’t say these bandits are successful. Maybe they try and fail.
As I said, it’s a fun idea to play around with no matter what. What do you think?
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