The end of 'Lost'? Maybe not! Plus: What's your idea for a new 'Lost' show?

by Jeff Jensen

The end of Lost is coming in May. Or is it? In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, exec producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof acknowledged that it was entirely possible that The Walt Disney Co., which owns Lost, could sooner or later produce more of Lost in some form or multiple forms—a movie, a new TV series, books. Said Cuse: “It’s a franchise that’s conservatively worth billions of dollars. It’s hard to imagine Lost will rest on the shelves and nothing will ever be made with Lost. Eventually somebody will make something under the moniker of Lost — whether we do it or not. We just made a commitment to this group of characters whose stories are coming to a conclusion this May.”

Yes, Disney could indeed revive the Lost franchise in the future, a la Star Trek: The Next Generation. One could imagine a whole new group of people coming to The Island and having a monster-hunted, Others-persecuted, time-toggled adventure of their own. My guess, though, is that won’t happen until Disney has milked every last dollar out of the work the Team Darlton Regime has produced. There must be years’ worth of DVD product that Disney can churn out: DVDs that tell the story of Lost in chronological order; DVDs that focus on characters, like “Greatest Hits: Charlie,” or maybe “Smokey’s Greatest Puffs,” etc.; or DVDs that focus on the core mythology episodes. This is exactly what Twentieth Century Fox did with The X-Files for years, and I suspect Disney will mimic their model. And they should. It’s smart business. And once the original Lost well has been pumped dry, and once Disney allows for a little more time to pass so the prospect of rebooting and relaunching Lost won’t seem so heretical…they will.

In other words: Someday, someone will try to do to Lost what J.J. Abrams did to Star Trek. (Emphasis on try.)

But all this business blather about Next Gen Lost is boring and even kinda sad—so let’s have some fun with it. Recently, the leading Lost wiki Lostpedia.org asked its Twitter followers for their ideas of a Lost spin-off. I responded by pitching my idea for a show about the REAL Henry Gale, the balloonist who crashed (and died) on The Island sometime before the castaways. (You can read my detailed summary of the proposed pilot episode in this Doc Jensen column from May 2007.) I now bring a version of the question to you: If there was a Lost: The Next Generation, with new characters and tweaked mythology, what should it be about? Use the message boards below to pitch your vision. And if you’d rather pitch a Lost spin-off, go for it—but I hope you’ll also Twitter your idea, too. Make sure to include #lostspin, and give a shout-out to @lostpedia, too.
http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/01/08/the-end-of-lost-maybe-not/?xid=email-alert-lost-20100108-item1