Ever since its unceremonious departure from the small screen the sci-fi show has garnered a sizeable cult following, and members of the cast occasionally assemble for Firefly panels at conventions. Such an occasion recently occurred at Long Beach Comic Con (via The Hollywood Reporter (opens in new tab)), and Captain Tight Pants himself Nathan Fillion had this to say in response to the oft-asked question of Firefly returning for more episodes:

“I totally get wanting more. I hear it all the time. “Is there going to be more? When is it? Could there be? What if there was?” And I get it. At the same time, we all had what I would call my dream job. It was the perfect position. Everything was great. Even the challenges we faced, we faced them together”. 

“We were all in it together and we were all pulling for the same thing, to make a great show. And I loved every minute of it. It’s really hard to look at that kind of stuff and say “Give me more”.  Because enough is enough. Oh my god. It was everything. It was everything. How can everything not be enough?”

For their part, Jewel Staite and Sean Maher would be more than willing to get back onboard the Serenity: “Sean and I want more. Last night we had dinner and we were in an Uber and we were not talking about Firefly in any way…. You were on your phone and texting away and, I [said] something about Netflix…. And Sean said this, very absentmindedly, “I can’t believe they haven’t picked us up”. 

The chances of more Firefly episodes or a sequel to 2005’s Serenity is extremely unlikely at this point, and maybe that’s for the best. Not only have the cast moved on but the show is a pretty perfect season of television as is, and bringing it back for more could tarnish that legacy. If you are in dire need of a Firefly fix though, the franchise has continued in comic books (which are canon). Or you could just watch the episodes again…

Images: 20th Century Fox

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“If somebody pointed to me and said, ‘You want to make a Black Widow movie?’ the answer would be ‘Duh.’”, Whedon told IGN (opens in new tab). “For two reasons: I think that character really is very interesting and very earthbound and so it’s the kind of action that I got to do less of with somebody like Thor or The Vision. When you get into your Superman territory it’s harder to maintain that sort of gritty action that the Russo brothers do so beautifully. And she’s got that kind of thing… and really do a spy thriller, really do a good, paranoid sort of John LeCarré on crack sort of thing. Also, Scarlett Johansson is just delightful. She works really hard, but she just spends most of her time cracking me up, so it would be a fun shoot”.

Making the Black Widow movie a spy thriller – a genre mashup that Marvel haven’t tried yet – is a really smart call, and having left Team Iron Man during Captain America: Civil War Natasha is an a really interesting place right now.  

The only problem is that it’s currently a little tough to see where Marvel would find the time for a Black Widow movie. Their ‘Phase Three’ schedule is pretty stacked for the next couple years – they have three movies coming out in 2017 and 2018 already – so if Johansson and Whedon ever do get their solo movie it probably won’t be until ‘Phase Four’. I don’t see the demand for a Black Widow movie dissipating between now and then though, so here’s hoping Marvel are as committed as they say they are (opens in new tab) when it comes to delivering the goods. 

Directed by Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, and starring Chris Evans, Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Holland, Anthony Mackie, and Sebastian Stan, Captain America: Civil War arrives in digital format in the US on September 2. The Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and DVD hit the UK on September 5 and the US on September 13. 

Images: Marvel 

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With great power comes great banter in writer/director Joss Whedon’s blockbuster multiplier, which isn’t the best superhero movie ever – but might well be the funniest.

Avengers Assemble is a power-play that’s unprecedented in Hollywood history: launching three different $100m franchises (four if you count the 2008 reboot) to construct one super-mega-franchise. And it has to be said, handing it to a 47-year-old fanboy whose single previous feature film ( Serenity ) couldn’t even scrape back its budget at the worldwide box office was a massive dice-roll.

Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) on the big screen together was always going to be a massive kick.

But could any screen be big enough for all them? Would Avengers Assemble look like four bodybuilders in an elevator? The suit, the smash, the hammer, the shield… Like X-Men: The Last Stand , Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man 2 , there was a real danger of heroverload.

Sure enough, it takes Whedon a while to assemble his Avengers, as S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Phil Coulson (Gregg Clark) recruit the superheroes to save Earth after Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor’s power-mad brother, returns to enslave mankind with an all-powerful cosmic cube.

“What does he want me to do, swallow it?” asks Ruffalo’s Dr. Bruce Banner. And from there, the zingers keep coming.

With X-Men and X2 , Bryan Singer showed how you could disguise a compelling ensemble drama as a superhero actioner. This is exactly Whedon’s speciality – as well as creating cult TV phenomenon Buffy , he worked on the scripts for X-Men and Toy Story – and his screenplay drags together a group of characters with pretty much zero interest in each other.

How? By locking big egos in small rooms and letting the funnies fly. Lifting the movie’s pace every time he steps on screen in the first half, RDJ’s Tony Stark catalyses the Avengers with machine-gun wit.

He gives both barrels to Thor, whether it’s his cape (“Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?”), his kingly lingo (“Shakespeare In The Park”) or the fact he hasn’t had a haircut since his own movie came out (“No hard feelings, Point Break”).

Arguably the least interesting and most poorly dressed of the Avengers, Cap duly suffers in his first brawl with Loki and finds his 1940s brain drubbed like a speed-ball by the sarcastic Stark.

But affectionately, Whedon plays to his characters’ weaknesses as well as their strengths as his comic-book heroes bounce off each other. And we do mean that literally.

Despite being mere mortals, Jeremy Renner’s laser-sighted archer Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s gymnastic spy Black Widow find key roles in the story. (And, just so you know, the coolest cameo in the movie doesn’t belong to Stan Lee.)

Despite Scar-Jo’s seam-straining catsuit and S.H.I.E.L.D. eye-candy Maria Hill ( How I Met Your Mother ’s Cobie Smulders, a Wonder Woman contender), there’s no sex factor in this superhero sausage-fest.

Instead, maybe the most interesting frisson sparks between fellow brainiacs Tony Stark and Dr. Banner. Third time’s the charm: Mark Ruffalo’s hand-rubbing performance as Bruce feels definitive and Whedon, in a few short scenes, captures a far more dangerous relationship between Banner and “the other guy” (as he dubs his alter ego) than we’ve seen in two previous big-screen Hulks.

One of the problems was that Mr Hyde never really looked like Dr Jekyll. But with Ruffalo’s features used to construct the CG monster’s face, a much more humanised Hulk emerges as the movie’s unlikely stand-out. Once the green giant bursts free, he grabs hold of the movie and yanks it out of Downey Jr.’s hands. The best moments and the biggest laughs belong to Hulk’s smash-happy personality – and only one of them is blown by the trailer.

Unlike Banner, bigness doesn’t come naturally for Whedon. So it’s no surprise that much of Avengers Assemble involves people talking in rooms. He hired Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey ( We Need To Talk About Kevin , Atonement , High Fidelity ) for that, but he’s also surrounded himself with a crew of slam-bang assistant directors who’ve worked on everything from The Bourne Ultimatum to Tarantino’s upcoming Django Unchained .

Behind the camera, Whedon’s dream-team help him put his money (more than $200m of it) where his mouth is: after an airship siege high in the clouds, the movie surges towards an exciting, epic extended finale of city-smashing carnage that stretches for a Transformers level of mass destruction.

As Loki’s army pours in from another dimension, one showboating unbroken action shot swoops through the battle to track each Avenger kicking ass against gigantic flying robo-fish and alien warriors riding space chariots.

Perhaps inevitably, there’s never quite enough real drama or danger for our effectively invincible protagonists. But this 142-minute romp between gods, monsters, men and supermen packs so much crowd-pleasing colour and humour that it’s impossible not to walk out grinning.

Just don’t walk out too soon. As if we need to tell you, a few tantalising post-credits seconds reveal a guest star who’s ready for the sequel(s)…

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