Hollywood loves a winner. In a landscape where some of the most marketable stories are underdogs overcoming the odds, the town still prefers seeing Goliath emerge victorious over and over again. In some cases, a presumed smash puts the cart before the horse, and the people making decisions up top have to recalibrate what their expectations are, especially when they make outsized bets on a property they believed to be a sure thing. “2012” was a very successful addition to the burgeoning portfolio of disaster movies from Roland Emmerich, and the film was a big feather in the cap of Sony Pictures for the year 2009 — a year that might as well be in another universe for how different that theater environment is compared to the one we currently occupy.
Emmerich tabbed John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandiwe Newton, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson, and Oliver Platt to be in the gargantuan undertaking as the characters at the center of this fictional storm. On the heels of a globe-spanning wobbly economy, a movie about the apocalypse was en vogue, as it was across most of pop culture. Just ask Britney Spears what the American national climate was like at the tail-end of the aughts. Against a backdrop of crushing tidal waves, tornadoes, and other disasters that seem a bit quaint as the antagonistic force in a big-budget movie at this point, Emmerich weaved a decently human-feeling tale about what people would do when confronted with complete and total calamity. (Again, a lot of the sentiment in “2012” feels downright “Pollyanna” after living through the early 2020s and remembering how things felt in the closing moments of the first decade of the new millennium.)
As a useful point, “2012” was the fifth highest-grossing movie of 2009, outflanked by only “Avatar,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” That all but screams “sure bet” to me. But for Roland Emmerich, the big box office returns felt like the start of a sprawling disaster franchise, but the proposed spin-off hit rough waters almost immediately, and no amount of box office success from the original film could save it.
2012’s spinoff was shut down because of production cost issues
ABC saw the box office bluster and started developing a spin-off for the small screen, but the gears had been turning for a television adaptation before “2012” even hit theaters. Roland Emmerich talked to Entertainment Weekly (via TODAY) about their plans for a spin-off on the red carpet for “2012,” and it’s clear that he and the other producers had already been thinking long and hard about how to push this story forward with the presumed success of the movie.
As Emmerich told the outlet, “The plan is that it is 2013 and it’s about what happens after the disaster. It is about the resettling of Earth.” He continued, “That is very, very fascinating. [Writer/producer] Harold Kloser and I came up with the idea, and we have the luxury of having a producer on the film who is a big TV producer, Mark Gordon.” The filmmaker then explained:
“We said to Mark, ‘Why don’t you do a TV show that picks up where the movie leaves off and call it ‘2013?’ I think it will focus on a group of people who survived but not on the boats … maybe they were on a piece of land that was spared or one that became an island in the process of the crust moving. There are so many possibilities of what they could do and I’d be excited to watch it.”
All of that sounds very enticing and would have been a fun way to explore the world of “2012” in episodic television, but there was one big elephant in the room that lingered above these lofty aims, and that is the simple fact that the spin-off would have been an ungodly expensive TV show. Entertainment Weekly’s reporting about ABC passing on the “2012” series points out that the network had just debuted other “high-concept genre shows,” “FlashForward” and “V,” in this case, and the results weren’t exactly something to write home about. Multiple factors led to “2012” not getting a big TV debut, and cost feels like the biggest one in the room at the time, which is a shame.
2012’s spinoff not making it to series mirrors some of our current streaming landscape
TV budgets have become a massive talking point in most entertainment reporting in 2025, multiple studios are actively trying to cut costs through any means necessary, and one of the easiest ways, once you get past all these trifling layoffs, is to trim off some of these very expensive, but lush, prestige TV shows. ABC series tend to keep things a bit lower key than something like HBO’s “House of the Dragon” is now, but there’s no question that a series that looks like “2012” would veer closer to what we call an “event series” now than “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” It’s interesting to see a show like “La Brea” do so well on NBC over a couple of seasons in our current climate, and recognize that its success would have been much tougher without visual effects getting drastically easier to render on TV in the ensuing decade between the two programs.
There’s a world where they press forward with “2012’s” spinoff and it succeeds, but there’s also a universe where it all comes crashing down as audience awareness just doesn’t materialize. It’s all a world of would have, could have, should have’s as far as the eye can see. Even in stories from over a decade ago, there are kernels that studios and networks can learn from, as a slam-dunk on the surface might not be worth the squeeze in the long run. But, I think we lose out on some things when the decision to bin a series in production stems from the executives getting cold feet rather than audiences having the chance to decide what the project is like for themselves, because everyone really does love a winner.
