Despite my recommendation of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi film Serenity, not to mention general praise from the majority of film critics across the country, it failed to grab the attention of the movie-going public. Over the past weekend Serenity fell to a distant ninth place, grossing just under $5 million for the weekend and bringing its total to $17.6 million in ten days.

Although the point may be lost at this point, as this was Friday’s news, Universal has made the first nine minutes of the film available on the internet via streaming video. Just point your browsers to the following link:

http://video.vividas.com/CDN1/3929_Serenity/web/index.html

All hope may not be completely lost – although the poor showing at the box office speaks against a planned trilogy of Firefly theatrical films, foreign box office and DVD sales may allow the trilogy to continue in the straight-to-DVD (the huge Family Guy numbers for the Stewie movie indicate a potential audience) or made-for-TV (the original series had respectable ratings in repeats on the Sci-Fi Channel) market.