Things are definitely not looking good for Jack Bauer to strap on the Satchel of Death for another go at terrorists.

Despite looking like a certainty back in December, it appears the 24 movie may be dead in the water.  Filming was scheduled to start in April, but Fox has pulled the plug for now with conflicting reports over the reasoining.

According to Deadline, Keitfer Sutherland was due to film the movie during an upcoming hiatus in his new series, Touch.  Fox was reportedly concerned that that it didn’t feel the hiatus was long enough to complete the film and held the movie off.  The rumor making the rounds, however, is that the film was coming in at a $45 to $60 million dollar budget and Fox was only ready to pony up $30 million for the feature.

Supposedly this film was going to be the first in a proposed trilogy, but if they can’t even work this one out, it seems unlikely we’ll see any of them.  Sutherland, for the record, does not appear to be the issue having knocked his fee down to $1 million as opposed to his usual $5 million with a bigger cut of the gross so he would be performance based.  It sounds to me like Fox is just being a tightwad on this, but we saw similar things happen with Disney’s upcoming Lone Ranger, and it’s now filming, so never say die.

[via Deadline]

It appears that Jack Bauer will once again be taking on terrorists in the near future, but this time it’ll be on the big screen as opposed to being in your family room.

Ever since 24 ended in 2010 there has been talk of a feature film coming along, but when it didn’t immediately happen a lot of people thought the project was dead.  According to Deadline, the film is now being fast tracked to match up with Keifer Sutherland‘s schedule that opens up come April.  Mark Bomback, who worked on that atrocious Wolverine movie, is currently tweaking the script and is expected to hand it in by the end of the year.  Nothing says quality like script tweaking a rushed project.

I would say I was intrigued by how 24 would work as a movie, but we got a taste of that from the TV movie they did, and the answer was, “not well.”  Not that the regular show was anything to get that excited to be honest, but a 2-hour movie was just that much worse to be honest.  Putting this on the big screen with a bigger budget will lead to it probably looking prettier, but I doubt it’s going to do much to improve the storytelling.

The thing is, no one will probably care.  So long as Jack yells “DAMMIT!” a few times and shoots a bunch of terrorists, people will still want to enter the world of CTU.

And after eight seasons, 192 episodes (and a TV movie), Jack Bauer has finally left our television screens.

I finally got around to watching the end of 24 (spoilers ahead), and … excuse me, but the final season wrapped up essentially without Jack (Keifer Sutherland)?  For almost the entire last hour Jack was out of action as he had been shot, and then kidnapped towards the end, so we had to count on the president’s sense of guilt to end all the insanity … er, okay?  We watched seven other seasons where it came down to the wire of Jack stopping whatever happened, but in season eight we get Jack not even being involved.

Despite that, I did like the very end with him finally telling Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) that he appreciated how she had always stood behind him, and it was about time he voiced that.  The ending wasn’t tidy (you know, no mass exodus into the light …), but if they had let Jack go off into a happy ending, it wouldn’t have fit the tone of the series in the least.  Instead he goes back on the run, hunted by people that should be thanking him and holding him up as a hero.

So, a feature film is expected, and while we will lose the real-time aspect, there are valuable lessons the series taught me over eight seasons:

• No matter what major city you are in, and no matter what time of day it is, you are never more than ten minutes from your destination.
• CTU has the worst employee screenings known to man as there was always a mole.
• Jack Bauer had the bladder of ten men.
• Everyone that had ever worked with Jack in the past was presumed dead … until the person needed to show up to be a villain or assistant.
• Opening a “socket” turns any computer into a super computer.
• No one that has the title of “president” can be trusted, no matter what country they are in charge of.
• Suturing up a wound not only stops bleeding, but apparently makes everything stop hurting, no matter how strenuous.

Make no mistake, I have no delusions to this show having ever been “good”.  It was a cliché-ridden piece of garbage that always made me feel dirty having watched it.  I was first grabbed by the concept of the series being done in “real-time”, and then it turned into a train wreck I couldn’t pull my eyes away from.  When I thought it had sucked as hard as it could, they would push it a little bit further.

So long, 24 … I still haven’t determined if I will miss your ridiculousness or not …

After eight seasons, Jack Bauer has finally met an enemy he can’t defeat: cancellation.

It’s been eight long years for Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, and Fox has decided the show has run its course.  The network was finding it just too expensive to continue producing it, and while there had been some talk of moving it to NBC, but Mr. Sutherland said, “that was never a real possibility for me.”

Now with the series coming to an end, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with executive producer, and show runner, Howard Gordon, and it sounds like the creative team was also a bit burned out by the 24-episode concept, and was feeling like they had limited themselves creatively.  Even with the series needing to start thinking about season nine, the show’s creative team hadn’t even come up with a basic concept for another season.

With the series coming to an end, this is leaving open the possibility for a movie which will still follow Jack Bauer over a day time period, but in a normal film length which means that he will finally be able to move between cities without the audience being bored for four hours while he flies somewhere.  The longtime premise for the film has been that Jack would travel to London, and Mr. Gordon confirmed that CTU would still be involved in some way, but this is far more about Jack as a character than anything.

I have to say that while I have watched every episode of the series, I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it.  It is so insanely preposterous at times that you have to wonder if the writers aren’t screwing with the audience.  ”This scene makes NO sense … throw it in any way, no one will notice!”  Don’t believe me?  I have four words for you: “Season two mountain lion.”  Need I say more?

How many nukes have gone off over the course of this show?  How many times has Jack been on the brink of death?  How many times has he quit CTU/the government, only to be pulled back in for some reason or the other?

No matter how much the show was horrible at, I kept watching because it was like a master class in everything that was wrong with storytelling in the television medium.  And despite everything it did wrong, I still oddly found myself enjoying it.  It was improbable, ridiculous and even insulting at times, and yet we all kept coming back season after season for the love of Jack Bauer … well, and the Satchel of Doom. (which has been missing for seasons seven and eight!)

As much as I loved and hated the show in the same breath, I will miss it at the end of the day.  (Ha!  ”end of the day” … see what I did?!?)  No one else could deliver a screaming line quite like Jack, never again will I hear, “Damn it!” screamed in that way just tells you “If this wasn’t on network television, Jack would be saying something a lot stronger …”

So, good-bye, Jack … and thanks for the hours and hours of me saying, “Why in the world am I watching this …”