It's been 20 years since Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas tore up the big screen, and even today it seems as if the film is as popular as it's ever been – with that iconic movie poster hanging in movie houses and on dorm room walls all over the world to this day. Scorsese is revisiting gangster life with his new highly buzzed-about HBO show Boardwalk Empire, and due to the instant success of that series, it appears some more Goodfellas could be on the way too.
Deadline reports that a Goodfellas TV series is in the early planning stages, with Goodfellas writer Nicolas Pileggi likely to write the pilot episode. There's no word on whether Martin Scorsese would also be involved with this, or where such a series would end up, though with all the violence and foul language one assumes it's destined to find a home in the pay cable atmosphere – perhaps at an HBO competitor like Showtime or Starz, the former of which could use a bad boy TV show like Goodfellas.
It's always interesting to look at movies that may become TV shows because in the case of Goodfellas, we already know how it ends. We know who ends up getting killed and who ends up going to prison – so would viewers tune in each week if they already know the show's final outcome? Part of the fun of something like The Sopranos is not knowing what happens next, and while Boardwalk Empire takes place during a time period that's been well documented, not as many people are familiar with the main players back then, giving writers more freedom to come up with more surprises.
Would you support a Goodfellas TV show, or do you feel like we've already been there and done that?
