CrazyAboutTV.com - TV Forums

[CrazyAboutTV]

Executive Producer Brannon Braga was asked why the Terra Nova premiere would be 2 hours long and air over two nights. He responded that there was just "too much story" for a one night premiere.

“We struggled for a long time how to fit it all in into 60 pages. There was a meeting with the network looking at each other, ‘what are we going to do’ and it was ‘let’s make it two hours’ – but there were challenges doing it as a two-hour too.”

[CrazyAboutTV]

Fox has announced that all of the talk about production overruns for Terra Nova have been blown way out of proportion by the media. While the two hour pilot will cost approximately $20 million, that cost will be spread out over the 13 regular episodes that Fox has ordered for the fall 2011 season.

Consider that Steven Spielberg's 2001 blockbuster movie, "Jurassic Park III" cost $93 million to produce. The cost of the Terra Nova premiere movie and all 13 episodes will cost about half that much.

And when you figure the number of fans that could be drawn away from the other networks to Fox for a spectacular series like Terra Nova is likely to be, it could be the best money that the network has ever spent.

[CrazyAboutTV]

Many critics of Terra Nova's huge production costs might feel a bit better about the show's chances of being financially successful after hearing remarks from Producer Peter Chernin's comments from a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal:

Q: I’ve heard you talk in interviews about how “Titanic” raised the bar for “event” movies. Are you aiming for “Terra Nova” to do something similar in TV? And if so, how is an epic project for the small screen different?

Mr. Chernin: I think it is important to do both movies and television shows that are bigger and better than everything else — so they stand out from all the rest. “Terra Nova” is ambitious with terrific special effects. But it also offers complicated and interesting storytelling well-suited for TV audiences. The time travel concept is a fascination that provokes a lot of conflicts for characters that audiences can relate to. “Terra Nova” transports about 1,000 families from a dying future Earth to prehistoric Earth, 85 million years in the past. The idea is to rebuild civilization and I believe the longing to start over is something that everyone can relate to at one time or another.

Q: How can the economics of a broadcast series on this scale work? Are you thinking about international sales and ancillary revenue more than syndication? Can you do 22 episodes on a series this ambitious?

Mr. Chernin: I hope audiences will like the series enough that they demand more than the 13 episodes we’re delivering this season. This is a series about characters. There’s no reason we couldn’t do 22 a year. From an economics perspective, as with other big event series television, we would expect the series will do well internationally and on DVD.

[CrazyAboutTV]

Brannon Braga disclosed some more information about Terra Nova in a recent interview with SFX magazine. Here's what he said:

“Without giving too much away, there will be connections to the future that are very mysterious and ongoing but only as they relate to our characters. We won’t do standalone stories in the future, but the future will play a part in this series......The look and feel of the show will be unlike anything people have seen before in that it’s a fascinating conglomeration of futuristic technology in the distant past. The colonists bring with them medical technology, sonic weapons and non-lethal weapons to battle dinosaurs because they don’t want to kill anything unless they have to so as not to rape the landscape. The look of these technologies in a prehistoric setting is pretty cool, but having said that they don’t have all the luxuries.”

[CrazyAboutTV]

Well ... I guess that I should have expected this due to all of the production problems with Terra Nova to this point. Fox just announced that the premiere movie scheduled for May 23rd and 24th is being pushed back to the Fall.

The reason given is that the special effects won't be ready in time for May. Hopefully, this Spielberg sci-fi series will be worth waiting for. I still have high hopes for it!

[johnmason]

Well it's on now and it's great Action, drama and intrigue Me likes it

[MainMan]

Next week is the big 2 hour season finale where the terra nova residents have to fight off the evil guys from the future. That should be great! I'll definitely be glued to the screen!