Muster your hopes, Dr. Horrible fans, for this post may provide a brief moment of happiness, followed by realistically coming to term with the fact that that status quo hasn’t really changed.
Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen, the trio that put together Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog back in the ’07-’08 writers strike, have a new show coming out, a little program called Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD that you might have heard of. That means they’re doing the publicity rounds, and being asked about the long awaited sequel to their hugely popular, produced on a shoestring budget musical production.
The last really concrete thing that happened to Dr. Horrible was that, after four years of being an internet sensation in three parts, it was packaged into one movie and actually aired on cable television. In another series, this might have come with increased producer attention, allowing it the money and leeway to get a sequel made. But Dr. Horrible was always a labor of love, intended to cost very little and just be a bunch of friends fooling around. The main hurdle between it and a sequel production was always the busy lives of its original stars.
There was some hope of that happening as recently as last year, when, in the lead up to the release of The Avengers, Joss Whedon made the soon to be proved very wrong assumption that in the lull after its release he might have some time to sit down and focus on a Horrible sequel in the summer of 2012. That was, however, before The Avengers became the third-highest grossing movie in history and Marvel Entertainment offered Whedon and his crew a chance at creating a S.H.I.E.L.D. television show. Not to mention that it was before Whedon accepted director/writer duties on Avengers: Age of Ultron as well.
So that’s the context in which The Hollywood Reporter asked Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, on the eve of the premiere of Agents of SHIELD, about where the Dr. Horrible sequel was. Says Tancharoen: “We wish we could be doing everything at the same time, but it’s always something that is in our hearts and always something we desperately want to do. But now Joss is away. He’s in London prepping, and we are here everyday consumed by this. But there are about six songs ready to go.”
There you have it folks! Six songs. That’s just over a third of the number that were in the original Doctor Horrible. For a bunch of folks with the kind of commitments that Whedon, Whedon, and Tancharoen have, I’d say that’s downright impressive. And I hope that at least one of those is a Busby Berkeley style Bad Horse number. He’s the Thoroughbred of Sin!
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
