Peter Berg starts getting your hopes up about continuing Friday Night Lights with another movie

By Sean O'Neal | July 15, 2011 | 9:52pm

Aux Features Film

Time to haul out your “Fantasy Reunion Projects” dreambook, find a fresh page after all of your entries about movie versions of Arrested Development, Party Down, and Veronica Mars, the Wet Hot American Summer prequel, and whatever else you might have scribbled there, then write down “Friday Night Lights movie.” Because, yes, the beloved show that finally has the years-too-late endorsement of the Emmys and a fan base who had just begun to accept that tonight’s series ender would be the last-ever moments they’d spend in Dillon, Texas, may go into overtime (<—-SPORTS METAPHOR) with a movie follow-up, if creator Peter Berg gets his way. Berg is reportedly hoping to make a sequel to the TV show that spawned from his 2004 film, and thus provide some sense of closure—ironically by taking away any sense of closure the finale might have given you. But hey, more Friday Night Lights, maybe!

The rumor began with a tweet from ESPN’s Bill Simmons claiming that Berg had told him he was hoping to do a big-screen continuation of the story of Coach Taylor and wife Tami (played by Emmy-nominated stars Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton), one that would pick up after the finale left off. TV Line then confirmed Simmons’ assertion, saying that Berg is definitely working on making it happen—although Universal, producers of Berg’s original Friday Night Lights movie, said only that they “do not currently have a FNL project in development.” But “currently” is so open-ended and conditional, and therefore we can spend the ensuing months asking all of Friday Night Lights’ many performers whether they would want to do a movie, and then they could affirm that, oh, they’d love to if one were happening, and then we can sit around and speculate for weeks and weeks and weeks in follow-up stories based on their conjecture! It’s like our future is being laid out for us, all bright and fresh and gleaming and never-ending.