If you thought that the lack of news about the development of a possible big screen continuation of the canceled TV series Veronica Mars meant that the project was dead, you may be wrong. Of course it’s not exactly going to be getting in front of cameras anytime soon. As the show’s creator Rob Thomas explained to Entertainment weekly –
It’s not dead… I continue to want to do it. It’s funny, because the rumors go around and around. Kristen Bell had said to somebody that I had written a script, and that wasn’t correct. I did have a treatment and a pitch, with which I went to Warner Bros. and [Mars producer] Joel Silver and said, ‘Here is the fastball version of the movie, the big studio version of the movie that I think we can make.’ And I think they did one of their brand-awareness surveys and were like, ‘We don’t know if we can make money with that.’ So it’s been back-burnered. But I still want to do it. I’m still happy to do it. We’re still looking into it.
Of course, Thomas concedes that there is one thing that could derail the story of a sardonic teen detective faster than studio indifference.
There is a bit of a ticking clock [because] Kristen Bell does continue to age… And doing ‘teen detective’ [is a] dicey proposition. But frankly, I think Veronica Mars as a 30-year-old noir detective at some point in the future would still be interesting to me.
Personally, I don’t think that Bell’s age would prove much of an impediment to a big screen installment. When the series was still being considered for a fourth season back in 2007, Thomas had pitched moving the show from the college setting of the third season to having Bell’s character being a rookie agent in the FBI. While the network didn’t bite, I think it was a perfectly legitimate approach. For any ongoing franchise to remain successful, characters can’t remain static, but must grow. Of course, the trick is to make sure that they don’t grown and change in ways that would alienate audiences. But I think that moving Veronica to either the FBI or having her open her own detective agency sounds like a logical progression fro the character. And as long as the story that they decide to tell is interesting and fun, the studios shouldn’t have to worry too much about the brand’s name recognition limiting any potential box office.
