Burn Notice Prequel to star Bruce Campbell - Jeffery Donovan to direct

Saw this on Burn Notice's facebook page:

EXCLUSIVE: USA has given a formal green light to the Burn Notice movie prequel starring Bruce Campbell, which will be directed by Burn Notice star Jeffrey Donovan. The two will also executive produce with Burn Notice creator Matt Nix, who wrote the movie, and the series exec producer Mikkel Bondesen. The untitled two-hour film, which was announced at this year's Comic-Con, will begin shooting in January on location in Bogota, Columbia for a premiere in Spring 2011. Burn Notice has wrapped production on Season 4, and filming on Season 5 is slated to begin shortly after the movie finishes shooting.

Here are more details about the Fox TV Studios-produced prequel. It is set in late 2005 and focuses on Sam Axe's (Campbell) last mission as a Navy SEAL. It begins after a faction of Colombian rebels makes trouble for the locally stationed military platoon, with Lieutenant Commander Axe (APA-repped Campbell) being sent down to investigate. As the mission unfolds, Sam begins to uncover the dark secrets of the area, learning the truth about sacrifice, deception, and ultimately what’s worth fighting for.

The idea to do a Campbell-centered Burn Notice movie offshoot originated a year and a half ago when Burn Notice made its Comic-Con debut. "We saw Bruce Campbell as the Bruce Springsteen of Comic Con," USA's president of original programming Jeff Wachtel said. "We saw the spectacular explosive fan reaction and realized that, in Bruce, we had not only a great actor but also a pop culture icon." USA executives decided to take advantage of that, and Nix quickly came up with the basic outline for a movie about Axe's back story that had not been explored on the series. The idea was put on the back burner while Nix was busy with Burn Notice and The Good Guys until Wachtel made the surprising informal announcement at Comic-Con in July. Donovan got the directing gig on the movie after impressing USA executives with his directorial debut on the Made Man episode of Burn Notice, which aired this summer.

Could the Burn Notice film spawn a series of a movies or a spinoff series starring Campbell? "It is a one-off," Wachtel said. "We’ll see how it goes."

 

I'll be watching it.

 

"Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe" premieres on Sunday, April 17th

 

Cool. I'll be watching this.

 

Chuck Finley's getting his own show.

Love all of Bruce's work..

 

Nice to see Mr. Campbell being given some attention. He's toiled in the trenches for a LONG time, and definitely paid all manner of dues.

Good for him.

 

This is great! I love Burn Notice but no Fiona?

 

Something tells me that with Bruce Campbell's character there will plenty of good looking women in this show.

 

The only downside to Burn Notice is that Bruce wasn't able to appear in Drag Me to Hell due to scheduling conflicts, breaking his streak working with Sam Raimi.

 

Good news, I'll watch—my wife will be thrilled.

 

Anyone watched the movie?

Looks like it delivered solid numbers

 

I did, and I enjoyed it. Nice action and as Bruce Campbell proved, a good dye job can take years off.

 

I wouldn't have bothered posting on this subject if someone hadn't already started a thread on it, but since someone did (lol), here is my .02.

God forgive Donovan for putting a giant pile of putrid video, such as that, on tv because I never will!

I had noticed the ads for it just a few days beforehand, and was really looking forward to it, as I am a relatively big fan of the series. The first 15 minutes or so were okay, but not particularly good. The military hearing was about as hokey as they ever get on the regular 'Burn Notice' (probably worse, actually), but I hoped it would get past that with something approaching at least a mediocre series production level. Unfortunately, that never happened, and things just went downhill from there, way downhill, I mean like from the top of Mt Everest to the bottom of Death Valley, sort of downhill. I can't imagine ever being young enough, or naive enough to have ever enjoyed such a poorly written script as that. It should be taken off the air asap, all copies of it destroyed, their remains placed in a radioactive burial container, and dumped into the deepest part of the Marianas trench, where God willing, it should remain for eternity. Afterwards all peoples even remotely connected to the movie, and its later extinguishment from visual history, should be eradicated 'with prejudice', their remains chipperfied 'Fargo style', fed to the hogs, the hogs then butchered, their remains sold to a starving third world country, and that country then nuked form existence, and all references to it removed form world history books, and cartography. Then the people responsible for having eradicated all those remotely connected with the film, should be eradicated in much the same manner, with this being carried out to the 4th or fifth generations of their families, until no one can remember just what all the eradication was about.

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

 

I thought it was entertaining. It's only a tv movie....

 

I agree with most of this. I love Burn Notice, even in it's campier moments, but this movie was pretty bad. It's a shame, b/c I would have loved a movie filled with backstory and what have you. However, this movie just seemed like one of those bad 1980's made for TV movies that I watched growing up.

Oh, well. New season starts relaitively soon!!!

 

That is exactly what I was hoping for, background, and instead it was pretty much a pointless waste of time, to put it politely, lol.

I just saw 'My Name is Bruce' for the first time. I reference this because in comparison to most of the god awful sci-fi movies Campbell did, this was was actually half decent, and certainly did a nice job at times of parodying his past films. Was it great, no, but it was at least fun for the most part. The 'Fall of Sam Axe' on the other hand was just painful. Ax 'Sam Axe'!

 

I liked Burn Notice for the first couple of years, but had begun to sour on it by the time Colby Bell arrived, and haven't watched it since.

And after watching 5 minutes of the prequel, I can safely say I won't be again.

 

I would have to agree with you on most of that, as I too think the series took a wrong turn for the worse, when Colby Bell was added. The plots have generally been of worse quality since then, and his introduction was done very poorly. Also, his character has never had a very believable storyline, and that is of course taking into account the general storyline, which we all know is rather stretched, but at least was entertaining, with more than average intelligence in the weekly plots.

 

Plus he's a really super dude. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with him at a book signing about 8-10 years ago here in Atlanta . . . I had read it all the way thru 2-3 times before meeting him so I didn't ask him any obvious questions. It really cracked me up to see his walk-ons in the 1st two Spiderman films.

 

I have that very book ready and waiting for me to read on the flight to Vancouver in a couple of weeks.

Looking forward to it.

 

Duke Nuke 'Em

So I take it that I better see it soon, before something really drastic happens?

 

I've been a big Burn Notice fan so I'll have to make sure to check this out.

 

I only caught half of the episode and didn't think it was that bad. It played out as a very average episode of "Burn Notice" without most of the humor of that show.

 

Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe"
I watched this last night and found it entertaining.Look forward to a similar show for Fiona when she meets Mike in Ireland......