Serenity Week continues...

I’ve just come from my second press screening of Serenity. My review of the film isn’t posted yet, but if you take a look at my on-the-fly ranking of the year’s films so far, you’ll get a clue as to my reaction.

I’ve been wondering if perhaps a lot more people aren’t going to feel the same way I do. At my first screening, last week -- which was packed not just with press but with fans and other assorted non-press, non-fan moviegoers who scored tix somehow -- two women got up and left halfway through the film. But there were many, many more cheers and claps and snickers of recognition and gasps and cries that mirrored my own. The audience at tonight’s screening was somewhat less vocal -- instead, they were so respectful they were almost silent, which is almost unheard of at an all-media advance screening. Both screenings had long lines of non-press folks who waiting more than an hour for the film with no guarantee of getting a seat.

There have been numerous advance fan screenings of the film over the past few months -- none have been advertised, and all sold out almost instantly; how fans found out about the screenings is anyone’s guess. The buzz around the Net has been extraordinary, not just at the typical venues but also at major political blogs, like Atrios’s Eschaton and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, not the first, second, or even third places you’d expect everyone to get worked up over a movie based on a failed TV show.

So what I’m wondering is: Is Xer Joss Whedon’s little movie gonna leap out and become a huge hit on the backs of a cult that no one even realized was there? Cuz that would be cool... and it could signal a new era of geek Xer influence not only in the audience but behind the camera.