According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bruno Heller, creator of HBO’s Rome (and now The Mentalist) wants to cap off the prematurely cancelled show with a final movie.
Necessary? Desired? I’d rather see the Deadwood movies, but no one’s putting that option on the table. Rome, on the other hand, did achieve closure after its own fashion. Octavian became Emperor Augustus; the transition of Rome to empire was complete. I’d have liked to have seen more of the story, sure, but it did seem as good a point as any to put a period on the show.
Really, the shame of the show was not that it ended abruptly, but that–having had notice of its demise–it had to cram in so much story to get to a resolution in its final season:
“I discovered halfway through writing the second season the show was going to end,” Heller said. “The second was going to end with death of Brutus. Third and fourth season would be set in Egypt. Fifth was going to be the rise of the messiah in Palestine. But because we got the heads-up that the second season would be it, I telescoped the third and fourth season into the second one, which accounts for the blazing speed we go through history near the end. There’s certainly more than enough history to go around.”
Now, I would have loved to have seen those seasons. But given how much season 2 wrapped up, there’s not much way of undoing that. Still, there is the whole rise-of-the-Messiah business, which we didn’t get to. (The series introduced, but didn’t have time to do much with, intrigues in Roman Palestine.) Who wants to cast Jesus?