The Cast of ‘Downton Abbey’ Has ‘No Idea’ About a Possible Movie
As with any landmark television show, one of the fun parts of revisiting Downton Abbey is seeing the number of careers it launched. Abbey served as a pretty incredible pipeline of talented British actors and actresses, all of whom seem to be landing solidly on their feet in Hollywood. That’s the good news for Abbey fans: the bad news is that with increased success comes increased scheduling difficulty. This wasn’t a series like Firefly where you basically only needed to lock down a handful of actors; to do Downton Abbey right, you’d want to bring in a dozen-plus members of the original cast, and that’s an increasingly tough proposition.
During a Television Critics Association press tour this weekend, former Downton Abbey star Joanne Froggatt, who appeared in all 52 episode of the series, was asked (via The Wrap) if there were any updates about the show’s long-rumored movie spinoff. Froggatt didn’t exactly go out of her way to hide her ignorance of any new developments:
Selfishly, it would be great to get together for 10 weeks and have a little reunion, but in all honesty, I have no idea. I absolutely have no idea. There’s been talk, there’s been conversations, but nothing has happened. We’re all sort of leaving it up to the gods. We have no information.
If we use the Community standard of success for any television series, a big screen Downton Abbey adaptation would allow the series to achieve the hallowed “six seasons and a movie” status, so there’s undoubtedly a lot of Abbey fans cheering for one last outing with their favorite characters. That being said, is the demand truly there to justify a Downton Abbey film? The wonderful/terrible thing about living in the era of peak television is that there’s always another incredible show to latch onto; shows like The Crown and countless others can fill that Abbey shaped void in fans’ lives, unlike in previous years where the loss of a show like Deadwood would severely diminish your options. It’s a lot harder to get behind a good show when most shows these days are good, but like Froggatt says, who knows? We shall indeed leave it up to Hollywood gods.