"Downton Abbey" producer hints at big-screen adaption

With "Downton Abbey" coming to an end, its executive producer is offering hope that a follow-up movie is at least a possibility.

By ending the award-winning TV drama several years shy of the 1929 stock market crash, producer Gareth Neame said rich territory is left to be mined if a film is made.

There's no script or a firm plan, he said, but a "Downton Abbey" movie could be a "wonderful thing." Afterward, he told The Associated Press that such a project could be made as a big-screen theatrical release, but reaffirmed it was speculative at this point.

However, it's time for the series itself to end while it's still popular and acclaimed, Neame said.

Its sixth and final season will begin airing in September in the U.K. and in January on PBS in the United States. Neame said the last season will bring back some faces from the past, but the focus of the final season is to wrap up story lines for the main cast.

The high-toned soap opera about the upstairs and downstairs occupants of a stately English mansion dealing with early 20th-century social change will end production Aug. 15.

Studio scenes remain to be shot, but production at Highclere, the estate that stood in for Downton Abbey, wrapped recently.

"That was a sort of interesting day," Hugh Bonneville, who plays Lord Grantham, said of the final taping at Highclere. The cast and crew marked the occasion by taking a "team photo" in the dining room, where the longest scenes were filmed.