Thor: The Dark World's Zachary Levi Still Wants a Chuck Movie

In the time since Chuck was cancelled, series star Zachary Levi hasn't lost any of the love he had [...]

In the time since Chuck was cancelled, series star Zachary Levi hasn't lost any of the love he had for the project when it was on the air. "If I had the power and the rights, I would have done [a Chuck movie] myself already," Levi told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview today. Who does have the power and the rights? Well, it's Warner Bros. Television, who also own the rights to both Veronica Mars and Pushing Daisies. Following this week's game-changing Kickstarter campaign from Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, a number of fan-favorite and cancelled-too-soon TV series are being discussed as "the next big thing" for Kickstarter.

What the actual odds are on getting any given movie made would vary from project to projects and the passion of the fan base is obviously a heavy factor--as is creator interest; while Bryan Fuller admittedly called Rob Thomas on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of resurrecting Pushing Daisies, Joss Whedon says he can't even think about the possibility of trying to bring back Firefly right now. Terriers creator Shawn Ryan, who has talked about Kickstarter and/or Netflix as a way to wrap up the cancelled series before, reiterated that in light of this week's events. "So much of the budget goes into advertising," for which Warner is reportedly footing the bill on the just-greenlit Veronica Mars, said Levi. "If we came out with a Chuck movie now, I don't know how many more people who didn't watch Chuck would watch this movie. You don't need to do a theatrical release. You're doing it for the fans. You'd want to do an online release, and if people want to pay extra dollars to get the DVD and Blu-ray, you can make money from those purchases. I would keep overhead as low as possible [with] social marketing." Series creator Josh Schwartz evaded the question somewhat on Twitter, saying, "Feels like a #Chuck movie would cost about $120 million. Big action set pieces. Plus we'd have to CGI Morgan's beard." Joking aside, the Chuck This blog reported back in 2011 that an episode of Chuck cost a little less than $2 million. That obviously isn't indicative of the total cost of doing a movie which would likely have to reconstruct many of the sets, and which would have some built-in costs that the show had already paid (gifts that keep on giving, discounting their overall cost per episode as the show ages)--but certainly if you can do a 45-minute episode of Chuck for $2 million, it's difficult to believe you couldn't make a 90-minute movie for three or four times that. That puts it closer to the $10 million estimated for Pushing Daisies than the $150 million Schwartz threw out there. You know, Levi is about to get one of those fat Marvel paychecks for Thor 2....

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