Rob Tapert at the 2009 'Xena' Convention talks about his newest show, 'Legend of the Seeker' currently airing in syndication. The series is filmed in New Zealand.
Fans hoping for a Xena movie had their dream sunk by series executive producer Rob Tapert when he told TorchOnline editor Brent Hartinger that movie wasn’t going to happen.
In an exclusive interview with the entertainment website, Tapert is quoted as saying It’s something that just won’t happen. I don’t think it’s going to happen for Lucy and Renee. In twenty years or ten years, in some amount of years, like McGyver, like Charlie’s Angels, it [could] happen like that [with other actresses].”
The news shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans who’ve wondered for nearly six years if the show would finally make its way to the big screen. News of a movie first surfaced in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2005 when Tapert told a crowd of about 1,000 at the 2005 ‘Xena’ Convention that a movie was on a horizon. Series guest writer Katherine Fugate was tapped to write the script for the movie later told the crowd that the contracts were just days away from being signed.
Tapert also told Torchonline that “I thought for a heartbeat it would [get made], but at the end of the day, the rules of motion picture marketing, where they have to commit $25 million to open a movie, in this environment, the momentum you need to get a movie made isn’t there to get a Xena movie made.”
By May 2005, however, it appears that the movie fell into pre-production hell when a budget couldn’t be agreed upon between Tapert and the holder of the series rights, Universal. Later that year, it was apparent that any movie to be made, would be made by a third-party entity attached to Universal.
At the January 2006 convention, Tapert told convention attendees that their best bet would be write to Rogue Pictures, a subsidary of Universal Studios. A year later in 2007, Tapert reportedly said that Rogue wasn’t interested.
Hopes seemed to be dashed until one year later when it was revealed that a direct-tv-dvd movie was a possibility. But by December 2007 during a fan question Q & A for a Xena related website, Tapert said that it wasn’t going to happen.
Throughout 2008, there was hardly a mention of the movie. Even at the 2009 convention, the movie wasn’t much of a discussion save for a few shout-outs from the fans attending the annual convention at the Los Angeles Marriott hotel held in January.
One of the biggest hurdles according to the TorchOnline interview was that the rights to the series played a key role. The rights are tied to Universal–not to Tapert or series creator John Schulian. This prohibited Tapert from searching for another studio to finance the film.
Tapert asserts that came down to a rights issue [editors note: this is a matter of Universal owning the rights and not letting go, not who really owns the rights since its clear that Universal does because all merchandising rights have to be cleared through Universal and not Renaissance Pictures] and a financing issue.
