Syfy Channel Greenlights 12 Monkeys TV Series
Rise of the planet of the monkeys!
Or, rise of the planet of the 12 monkeys, anyway, because it looks like the Syfy Channel is getting into the post-apocalyptic business with a TV series based on the 1995 movie “12 Monkeys”, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe.
The original movie, based on the French short “La Jetee”, goes something like this:
In the year 2035, convict James Cole volunteers reluctantly to be sent back in time by scientists to discover the origin of a deadly virus that wiped out nearly all of the earth’s population decades earlier. But when Cole is sent mistakenly to 1990 instead of 1996, he’s arrested and locked up in a mental hospital, where he meets a psychiatrist and the son (Brad Pitt) of a famous virus expert.
No word on what the TV series will be about, but I suspect it’ll continue on the idea of a criminal from the future stuck in the past trying to avert a disaster in the future. I don’t know how they’re going to turn that into a whole series, but hey, that’s why they get paid the big bucks, right?
The idea is to make a 90-minute (2-hours plus commercials) movie as a back-door pilot for an ongoing series. Pretty much standard operating procedure for Syfy. All those cool 2-hour movies you saw on the network that sorta looked like two pilot episodes stitched together, but never went on to become a TV series? Yeah, all backdoor pilots that didn’t make it to series.
Via : THR
