It’s the 80s revival you’ve been waiting for.
Forget The A-Team and Transformers movies which lit up cinemas screens over the last few years, forget the endless rumours about Ghostbusters 3 – if there was ever a symbol of the 1980s it was the bermuda love triangle of Blake Carrington, Krystle and Alexis who fought, loved, and smouldered in most of the livings rooms of the Western world in Dynasty. And it’s heading to the big screen.
I never saw the series, but was aware that it existed – the opening titles (which you can see below) will throw people back to a time when shoulder pads arched as high up as the hair, and the soap opera was given its greatest soprano in Joan Collins’ bitch from a thousand fathoms, Alexis.
I did begin to watch the series a while ago with some friends, with the moral and material complexities of very rich people in business and love being too much for us to bear, and we never got past the end of the first series (which is when Joan Collins turns up and things were meant to get interesting), but the news that it’s coming back as a movie, a 60s set prequel (and start of a franchise no less) will come as no surprise to anyone following the Hollywood trends.
Anything not nailed down to the 80s is fair game and the creators of the show are keen to tell everyone who will listen that their property is ripe for a good old plucking.
Creator of the series Richard Shapiro talks to E! Online about why on God’s green and pleasant Earth they are thinking about making a movie.
We’ve given thought to the movie before and we’ve been approached by a lot of companies, but no one seemed to have a proper fix on it. Then suddenly we said, ‘Let’s do it [ourselves]!’—and we’re the ones to do it.
It was my daughter Florie’s notion to do a prequel, and that sounded very very good to us. It’s how young Blake doesn’t realize he’s the son of Tom Carrington, but then he finds himself at the head of this company and surrounded by assassins and people who want to do him in.
Assassins!
It appears our good friends at Coming Soon also spoke to the man Hollywood knows as Richard Shapiro,
We’re taking the Dynasty family to places they’ve never been before…It’s fun, because the fans of the show will know from the series where each of the characters end up, eventually, but what they won’t know is how they get there.
There will be some very unlikely twists and situations, and people will not be expecting a lot of what we’re planning. We’re going to do a lot of coloring outside the lines…[t]he movie will be the old Dynasty, of course, but with horns.
Horns!
Co-creator Esther Shapiro’s comments in The Sun are a goldmine,
Nostalgia has always been big, but we want to take it a step further.
Does she mean looking back further? Or maybe she means nostalgia before it’s nostalgia? Which would make it ‘experience’. Explain please Esther…
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.
Manhood!
Nothing would entice me into the cinemas more than the promise of Blake Carrington’s young manhood. Richard Shapiro goes on,
In a way, these characters were prisoners in television. 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.
James Bond in Dynasty? I don’t know. My brain hurts and I need a cool martini to calm me down. Expect more news on this one as the soul of originality and inspiration weep all alone in a small corner of Hollywood.
