Family Guy Movie Coming Soon?
Last week, McFarlane's show American Dad reached a milestone with 100 episodes aired. At the party to celebrate, McFarlane talked to Wired about the possibility of a Family Guy big screen movie and it became clearly that one was not only likely, it was just about inevitable. Quotes beyond the fold.
So here's McFarlane on the Family Guy movie:
We want to do it. Fox wants it. We know what we want to do with it. It's just a question of finding the time. That's why The Simpsons took so many years to do theirs. It wasn't because they didn't know what they wanted to do with it. They just couldn't fit it into the schedule. There's so much to do for a weekly animated series — twice as much as you have to do for a live-action show. So, we're finding time where we can. We're in the early stages right now.
Inevitable, really, I suppose. There have been feature length Family Guy DVDs before, but to the best of my knowledge they were effectively multiple episodes stitched together, as with the Futurama releases of the last twelve months or so.
Personally, I'm with Cartoon Brew's Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi on the subject of Family Guy and Seth McFarlane's other TV shows – basically, that they're utterly dreadful and that culture would be better served by broadcasting white noise in their place – but I do know they have their fans. Indeed, Family Guy ranks alongside the Snakes on a Plane reshoots and Firefly spin off Serenity as a testament to fan power in action as the show was canceled and then recommissioned after tremendous sales on DVD.
One of the criticism most frequently levelled against Family Guy is that it steals its jokes from other, better shows and that one is pretty much undeniable. Plenty of other animators hate the show too – indeed, there's a Wikipedia page dedicated to folk's dislike of Family Guy. You don't see that for every show now, do you?