The Hollywood North Report certainly seems to think so … they’re reporting that Whedon has signed on to write and direct with the start date pushed back to summer, 2005. I’m sad to Singer go, but if this is true it means the franchise is in good hands …
And because good Whedon news always comes in pairs, Coming Soon is reporting that priciple photography has now completed on Serenity. Yummy.
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Oh, I so disagree. The Whedon directed episodes of his own shows are consistently some of the strongest. In fact I disagree so badly that when I first saw this post it prompted me to pull down my Firefly DVDs and watch the pilot. And I enjoyed it so much that I immediately watched it again with the commentary. Whedon knows what he’s doing behind the camera.
The X3 rumor may still turn out to be false, but it makes a lot of sense … you’ve got a dead solid writer with a strong cult following with an existing relationship with the studio in question who is also currently writing a new X Men title and wrapping up his first feature film, which I’m sure Fox has been seeing dailies of if they’re considering him to direct X3. I really can’t think of anybody better qualified to do it. If there’s a knock on Whedon it’s that his work has tended to be almost entirely dialogue driven rather than action based, but you could’ve said the exact same thing about Singer before he started on X1. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this turns out to be true, though it also wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t announce it until Serenity was out of post production since Whedon may not want to, or be allowed to, be drawing pay checks from two different studios at the same time.
So far nothing I’ve seen has convinced me that Mr. Whedon can direct. Sure, he can write and write very well, but direct… that’s another story. Naturally I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Serenity, but the X3 news is a tad suspicious.