April 3rd, 2008
NBC Reveals Heroes’ Season 3 Return: In a Word, Big
It looks like NBC is very well aware that pulling the plug on Heroes’ Season 2 because of the Writer’s Strike has done great damage to the show among its viewers, because according to the network’s co-chairman, Ben Silverman, NBC plans a pretty major comeback for Heroes, including opening the September 15th Season 3 premiere with what he calls “a massive two-hour Heroes film”. Wow. Massive, huh? Silverman also talked about the scrapping of Heroes: Origins, the proposed Heroes spin-off show that was supposed to bring some big heavy hitters like Kevin Smith and Eli Roth into the Heroes universe.
More:
“We consciously chose to rest [Heroes] this spring so that [creator] Tim Kring and his team could get ahead of the creative and build up to a massive event–a three-hour Heroes night,” Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said during the network’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on April 2. “On Monday, Sept. 15, we’ll kick off with a Heroes clip show to try to bring back the audience and [then air] a massive two-hour Heroes film.”
Silverman also explained why the heavily hyped, much-anticipated Heroes: Origins was scrapped. The show was originally conceived to help eliminate Heroes repeats, and directors and writers–including feature-film vets Kevin Smith, Eli Roth and Michael Dougherty–were already lined up before NBC dropped the idea.
“We were taxing our creative team to do too much around that,” Silverman said. “We wanted 35 Heroes [episodes] and 12 Heroes: Origins, each of which was supposed to be a mini-movie and backdoor pilot. We reached far and challenged our people, and we decided it was better to focus on keeping the Heroes mothership as strong as possible.”
Heroes returns September 15th 22nd, 2008 with Season 3.
