Friday Night Lights Connie Britton Kyle Chandler - H 2013
NBCClear eyes, full hearts, no second movie.
Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg has put the kibosh on the proposed follow-up feature film.
“There’s not gonna be a movie,” the producer-director told Collider while doing press for his upcoming movie Lone Survivor. “We talked about it, some people thought it was a good idea, some didn’t; I’ve come to believe it’s probably not a good idea and I seriously doubt it’s gonna happen.”
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Based on the 1990 book by Berg’s cousin H.G. Bissinger and adapted into a feature film starring Billy Bob Thornton, the movie turned into NBC and DirecTV’s Connie Britton–Kyle Chandler drama. The low-rated but critically praised drama’s 76-episode run ended in 2011. (DirecTV stepped in to spare the series from cancellation, landing the series with a first-run window before they were broadcast on NBC.)
The news comes after both Berg and showrunner Jason Katims (Parenthood, About a Boy) fueled rumors of a proposed follow-up feature film inspired by the 2009 scandal surrounding then-Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach.
Chandler, who won an Emmy for his role as Coach Eric Taylor, said a year ago that he wasn’t interested in reprising his character for the potential movie. “My general attitude about Friday Night Lights is that it was a great movie with Billy Bob Thornton. And it was a great TV show,” he said at the time. “I never had more fun doing anything. … They ended it at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way.”
Katims, meanwhile, told The Hollywood Reporter last year that producers were trying to figure out what story they wanted to tell, noting the movie was “something we hope will happen.
“Before any serous conversations go on, we want to make sure that we have a great story,” he said.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @Snoodit
