Soap opera Dynasty to be resurrected for a feature film

Why didn’t Hollywood think of this sooner? You would imagine that movies based on various hit soap operas would be preferable to making films about Rubik’s Cubes and Atari games, as they actually have you know, plots, but it appears the train is just getting rolling on this front, for better or worse.

A DALLAS movie has been in the works for a while, but has struggled to pull itself out of development limbo. Another franchise is now attempting to avoid that fate as now there’s a script for a DYNASTY movie being drafted. Now, I’ve never seen the show, and don’t have time to call my grandma to consult, but I’m told it’s about the ups and downs of an extremely wealthy family. But isn’t this kind of bad timing due to the whole bad economy thing?

“The time is right” says creator Esther Shapiro, “Nostalgia has always been big, but we want to take it a step further. We want to go back to the beginning with these characters and use the film to trace their roots. We’re taking Blake Carrington back to his young manhood and when he met Alexis, and setting the movie in the Mad Men era of the 1960s. It will give us the opportunity to start fresh, without the constraints that television placed on our characters in the series.”

Huh? What constraints were put on the characters exactly?

“In a way, these characters were prisoners in television,” adds Richard Shapiro. “We were always constrained by the smaller budget of a TV series, and all the standards and practices that governed the content of the show. In the movie, if we want to have some James Bond style action, we can afford to do that. If we want to have a steamy love scene, we can do that. If we want to go a few steps beyond what they would allow on 1980s TV, we can move ahead those few steps, and then some.”

So there you have it, James Bond meets Mad Men. Can’t go wrong! No telling which of the cast will return as this is supposed to be a prequel, but surely it will be chock full of cameos most of us won’t recognize.