It seems dangerous to hope for anything good right now, but for Deadwood fans, the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting brighter. After a full decade of vague promises that David Milch was working on a movie to wrap up the loose ends of the brilliant but truncated HBO series, HBO executives and the show’s past (and hopefully future) cast started saying that they’d laid eyes on a copy of the script, and now comes news that the production is actually looking at a start date as early as the fall of 2018.
One of the biggest reasons to despair of the movie coming together is that series stars like Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, and John Hawkes have become bigger and much busier names in the years since, which makes lining up their schedules a Herculean task. One of the cruelest aspects of Deadwood’s premature demise is knowing that if the show had come along even a few years later, it would almost certainly have gotten at least a brief opportunity to end on its own terms, the way Looking and Sense8 did. And while it seems foolish to let our hopes get too high, David Milch might have some choice words for anyone who doubts that the Deadwood movie will finally happen.
