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John Cusack dodging pieces of falling mountain may have been perfect on the big screen, but the “2012” idea is apparently too ambitious for the television set.

Rumors have been circulating for a while that a television series based on the disaster movie could be in the works, that would chart the lives of some of the survivors from the film. The series would be set in Africa, which survived the apocalypse, and the original idea was to develop a theme very similar to that of ABC’s “Lost.”

“We tried to do that. But the TV people soon realized what we really wanted to do with the concept,” said director Roland Emmerich, who led both the movie and the television project. “They said, ‘You cannot do this on television.’ So I said, ‘Let's not do it.’ It was just too big for TV, what we wanted to do."

Does that mean a slightly less-extravagant version will be in the pipeline? Not if Emmerich has anything to say about it. The director has opted out of working on a cheaper version of the “2013” series as those kind of changes would compromise his original vision.

“It's not totally dead. [Executive Producer] Mark Gordon is still trying to come up with an idea on how to make it cheaper,” he explained. “I don't think it will happen. I had a certain vision. We realized what kind of compromises we were going to have to make. Because of that, I said, ‘No thank you.’

And don’t expect a big screen followup, either … his idea was simply meant for serialized television.

“No, no, no. It was not a sequel. It was a story you could only tell once,” Emmerich said. “There was no sequel to Noah's Ark. It would have been a great TV show. Because it would have dealt with the facts of arriving in Africa.

"We would have seen what happened had Cape Town survived. Those people already living there would be majorly pissed, because the ships didn't take them. There was this whole political edge to it. It would have been a very political TV show. It had such big themes.

"It was about reaching for the stars. There was an economic reality that kept it from becoming a reality. We didn't want to compromise. We said, ‘Let's not do it.’”