Like with the poor, beat-up horse in my backyard, it is difficult to stop milking the cash cow when she is still laying golden eggs. When intellectual property is commercially successful, most TV, movie or videogame studios would rather cheapen a series or character (sometimes driving it into the ground) than lose out on guaranteed profit by making more content with the beloved elements. The trend of spin-offs is troubling in the sense that the money to produce these spin-offs could be used to finance new, exciting, original content. By that same logic, the money could instead be used to produce mediocre or just plain terrible content”” like another reality TV show about dating. Here are some that, thankfully, have the possibility not to be completely awful.
Walter White’s tragic and OH-MY-GOD-intense journey is coming to a close and AMC theaters will not let dead things rest. “Breaking Bad” is one of their most popular shows, and the studio will lose the millions who tune in every Sunday. This sounds like a real dilemma for the studio. You know what they should do? They had “Better Call Saul.” The show stars Bob Odenkirk, who plays Saul Goodman, one of the sleaziest lawyers in Albuquerque. AMC recently greenlit the project to start production. As with all of these spin-offs, cautious optimism must be employed at all times to avoid disappointment, but “Better Call Saul” is headed by Peter Gough, a writer and producer for all five seasons of “Breaking Bad.”
Speaking of not letting dead things rest, “The Walking Dead,” another AMC series, is set to launch a spin-off series. This news is especially interesting to anyone who has considered what “The Walking Dead” is about: people living through the zombie apocalypse and having awful, horrible things happen around them. So, basically, this new show will be exactly that, but with new faces and a different timeslot. A title has not been announced, but “The Other Walking Dead” or “AMC’s Double Down” might be a good one to use. Granted, taking such a reductive look at the series is unfair. The creator of the comic book series, Robert Kirkman, will be writing the other series along with Gale Anne Hurd and Dave Alpert, so there is a lot of potential for it to be an incredibly gripping and brutal show”” probably some cannibalism as well to spice things up once in a while.
J.K. Rowling was not “just kidding” when she announced that she will be penning a new film in the Harry Potter universe. The new set of films will be based on a past Headmaster, Newt Scamander. The series is neither a prequel nor a sequel though it is set 70 years before the adventures of Harry Potter. It is an expansion of the Harry Potter universe, possibly involving a lot of CG fantasy creatures, because Scamander is a magizoologist. A magizoologist is a wizard who studies magical creatures. Duh.
The Minions from the “Despicable Me” movies have the same level of intelligence as me, but far outdo me in terms of lovability.. I don’t think I have ever really been loved, unlike the Minions who are irresistibly adorable, aggressively quirky and completely idiotic. A spin-off film was announced a year ago, in which the Minions would be the stars instead of Gru, his adopted children and his nose. The animated film, like Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur,” was recently delayed to 2015.
