Prequel or spin-off movies to long-dead TV shows is all the rage now, from the Jesse Pinkman coda film El Camino to the Deadwood movie to the forthcoming Sopranos picture The Many Saints of Newark. One heavy-hitter that isn’t getting the fancy film treatment (for now)? The Wire. But it almost did, according to one of the ensemble show’s stars, onetime Jimmy McNulty player Dominic West.

The English actor was speaking to Empire when he dropped the news. “We were talking about maybe [making] a movie of The Wire for a while,” West told them. “[Series creator David Simon] said it would have to be a prequel, but we were all looking a little long in the tooth.”

But Simon had a Plan B. West said he floated the idea of a project that simply got the band back together, landing on (you guessed it) a project focusing on a young Louis Armstrong. It was a bit more ambitious than that; West said it would have been “a crime story set in New Orleans that was not a Wire film, but would feature the entire Wire cast.”

Alas, that fell through, too — for now. That being said, Simon is done with his latest show, the 1970s porn-world chronicle The Deuce, and perhaps he can be guilt-tripped into making a non-prequel that exhumes McNulty and Kima and Bunk and Cedric and Lester and Herc and Barksdale and Marlo and Tommy Carcetti and Senator Clay Davis and maybe even Bubbles and perhaps Ziggy, too? Plus there could be flashbacks featuring such deceased favorites as — spoilers? — Stringer and Omar and Bodie and Wallace and Frank Sobotka and whoever else wasn’t lucky enough to survive five seasons.

(Via Empire)