I'm not saying that "American SF TV shows are less popular in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe" is the only possible explanation, but there's got to be some reason why there's such a discrepancy.
But you're trying to estimate interest in the show based on internet traffic, which is probably one of the
least accurate measures you could use. When
B5 was in production its internet presence in the U.S. and U.K. was out of all proportion to the audience size as measured by the ratings. There were probably
more and more heavily trafficked websites and discussion groups devoted to
B5 at the time than to
Trek - because the
B5 audience tended to be younger (remember all those paleo-
Trek fans from my generation who latched onto that show and never looked at any other SF - they weren't on the web, by and large in 1994.)
B5 fans also tended to be more tech-savvy and to operate outside the "SF fandom establishment", which was largely in the hands of hostile
Trek fans on the more commercial side, and in the hands of literary snobs hostile to all television on the more academic side. So they found other channels of communication. If you'd judge
B5 and the
Trek shows solely on internet traffic you would have concluded that
B5 was far and away the more popular universe.
One fairly simple explanation is that really
large-scale organized SF fandom is largely an invention of the English-speaking nations, and until fairly recently has been pretty much limited to those nations - and spread fastest to countries like Germany and France. Mass communication tools like cheap photocopiers and mimeo machines (the original media of fandom) and later the internet also tended to come to the more prosperous north of Europe first, which helped spread fandom even more. There may be tons of
B5 fans in southern Europe who simply aren't aware of one another and who therefore aren't making a lot of noise for us to notice. If you're the only one in your school or town who ever watches
B5, you might assume that the same is true everywhere and not bother looking for websites. Or, given that the vast majority of
B5 sites are based in the U.S. or the U.K., you might be kept away because you don't read or speak English, or because you don't think your English is good enough.
That said I suspect that
B5 merchandise did better in the U.K., where a smaller population allows a comparative small number of people to make a bigger splash in the market place. 5,000,000
B5 fans in the U.K. would be big. In the U.S. it would be a drop in the bucket. (And would get the show cancelled if it were on a major broadcast network rather than in first-run syndication or on cable.) I doubt that the ratings in terms of audience share were ever all that much better outside the U.S. than they were inside. None of which means that I don't think a
B5 film can do well. A movie needs fewer tickets sold to be a success than a TV series needs ratings points. The vast majority of folks who have never heard of
B5 or who are only vaguely aware of it will go to see it if the trailers and TV spots look interesting, and they'll tell their friends to go see it (and maybe go back a second time themselves) if the film is well-made and they enjoy it. All this business about people not knowing the franchise or the backstory is fanboy paranoia that ignores the fact that probably 80% of the films released every year are
not sequels or otherwise parts of franchises that people know, and that those that are based on franchises from other media (
X-Men,
Superman,
Harry Potter) live or die on their merits
as films and most of the people who see them will not have ever read the book or the comic book or the TV series they were based on.
If Warner Bros. makes a good film and markets it intelligently (and they avoid any release date disasters like going head-to-head with a probable blockbuster, or open on the day another terrorist attack happens) it will attract an audience and keep doing so. Just like any other film that gets released into the marketplace.
Regards,
Joe
