Remember Firefly, the Joss Whedon sci-fi/western/Whedon show that was on FOX for about 10 minutes? If you don't, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you do, the following won't be news to you. I just think it's cool how a dedicated and vociferous fan base not only convinced Universal to give Whedon the money to make a big-screen version of a flop TV show, but my peeps also did this ("my peeps," is that still something you'd say?):

In October, when Universal's co-president of marketing, Eddie Egan, booked a routine rough-cut preview in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, he was amazed by the explosive response from the research-screening recruits who were clearly rabid "Firefly" fans. He wanted to know just how they had learned about the screening.

It turned out that one fan had identified the movie and tipped off her entire "Firefly" community (known as "browncoats") with one Internet post. Some of them had driven from Arizona and Seattle, Egan says. Universal, deciding that they had something bigger than they thought, pushed the action adventure off of its spring lineup and into the fall.

The studio staged three waves of word-of-mouth sneak preview screenings (which do not advertise the name of the film) in 35 cities where "Firefly" had earned the best ratings, including Toronto and San Francisco. Each time, Whedon posted fan screenings on his blog: once, with a link to a Fandango site where they could order tickets. Each time, all the tickets were sold within five minutes. Fans return for repeat viewings, Egan says, bringing new people with them.

"As the industry struggles to redefine the paradigm of the movie business," Egan says, "and what makes people go to movies or avoid them, a piece of text on a Web page sold out theaters."

You keep hearing about how Hollywood is in a "death spiral" (and after reading this, I'm not sure if we're still supposed to believe that or not), so maybe this kind of thing will give them a different perspective on the stereotypical housebound Internet nerd. We're housebound Internet nerds who can open a movie, dammit!

I'm not even going to front: I'll be there opening weekend. ("Front," right?) Do you think they'll explain the whole Blue Sun thing? Will Kaylee need to take lots of space showers? And did Whedon read the Malcolm/Jayne slashfic I sent him?

Update: As if the whole thing wasn't nerdy enough, Nathan "Malcolm Reynolds" Fillion has posted a funny rant about trying to buy copies of the Serentity comic in his hometown of Edmonton. The comic shop guy was, well... "Let me tell you folks, this fella had an attitude, and a smirk that you wanted to knock off his face with a baseball bat dipped in dog poop." Check it out.