SXSW London: ‘Downton Abbey’ Producer Says ‘The Grand Finale’ Gives Franchise a ‘Full and Proper Conclusion’
“Downton Abbey” looked like it had closed its doors for good in December 2015 when the awards-conquering TV series came to attend. Then came the hugely successful film spinoff, which seemed to have drawn to a natural end with the second feature “A New Era,” in which Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess passed away in the final scenes.
But this September sees the release of the third film “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale,” bringing back most of the original cast members, plus one-off returnees Paul Giamatti and Dominic West and newcomers Joely Richardson, Alessandro Nivola, Simon Russell Beale and Art Froushan.
As the name suggests, “The Grand Finale” is set to be the conclusive “Downton Abbey” film, which was something that Gareth Neame, CEO of Carnival Films (owned by Universal International Studios), which has produced “Downton” since the start, underlined at SXSW London.
Speaking at a special Golden Globes panel discussion at London’s Shoreditch House with Globes president Helen Hoehne, Neame discussed the “interesting exercise” that was taking a “globally successful TV show and then turning it into a film franchise.”
Neame said was “always quite optimistic about it, because I felt the TV show was very cinematic anyway, and would work on the big screen.”
Rather than trying to retain a cast for six months each year, which had been the case for the TV series (and Neame noted was becoming more difficult as they had “become famous and wanted to do other work”), the features only required the actors for 12 weeks every couple of years.
“So it was a practical way to keep ‘Downton’ going,” said Neame. “But again, we don’t want to do that forever, either. And we didn’t want for the franchise and for ‘Downton Abbey’ just to come to an end. We wanted to have proper closure. So for fans of ‘Downton Abbey,’ the September movie is a full and proper conclusion to the stories of all of those characters.”
