As SciFiMafia has reported to you last fall, writer/director Roland Emmerich had announced that he was developing a television series sequel to his disaster film “2012” even before “2012” was out in theaters. This TV series aptly titled, “2013” would follow earth’s survivors struggling to rebuild humanity in a “Lost”-type fashion in Africa, but “the scope of the project proved too big for the constraints of serialized television” and the project is now on hold.
Executive producer, Mark Gordon (“2012”, “Grey’s Anatomy”) was trying to wrestle the idea to reduce the scope, but Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow”, “ID4”) was not comfortable with compromise:
“… the TV people soon realized what we really wanted to do with the concept. They said, ‘You cannot do this on television.’ So I said, ‘Let’s not do it.’ It was just too big for TV. What we wanted to do.”
What exactly did Emmerich want to do and would he try to make this sequel into a feature film? He answered:
“No, no, no. It was not a sequel. It was a story you could only tell once. There was no sequel to Noah’s Ark. It would have been a great TV show. Because it would have dealt with the facts of arriving in Africa. We would have seen what happened had Cape Town survived. Those people already living there would be majorly pissed. Because the ships didn’t take them. There was this whole political edge to it. It would have been a very political TV show. It had such big themes. It was about reaching for the stars. There was an economic reality that kept it from becoming a reality. We didn’t want to compromise. We said, “Let’s not do it.”
“2012” is due out on DVD and Blu-Ray on March 2nd.
[Commentary]
Hold on now, it’s a sequel that’s not a sequel? Sounds like this was a very high-concept show that thankfully was halted before it got too carried away. What could be so expensive about a group of people trying to rebuild society? All the CGI-heavy elements were presumably done with in the movie “2012”. It could be an interesting idea, but his interview doesn’t inspire that much confidence in the show for me.
[Source] MovieWeb
