For the longest time, it looked certain that Hollywood’s current – and seemingly relentless – drive for nostalgia would result in a resurrection of Stargate, the cult classic that first debuted more than two decades ago. MGM and Warner Bros. had even mapped out tentative plans for a rebooted trilogy, one designed to wrap up the storyline that first began in 1994. Sadly, it looks like those plans have since fallen through.
Chatting to Empire ahead of The Librarians season 3, Stargate creator Dean Delvin conceded that while the project had displayed signs of potential early on, the big-screen reboot “kind of fell apart” before it could enter development.
“It looked good for a couple of months, but now it’s not looking so good. There are just a lot of things that have to fire at the same time, and there was a moment where I thought it was all firing at the same time, and then it all kind of fell apart.”
Devlin, who wrote and produced Stargate alongside Independence Day helmer Roland Emmerich, attributed the blame to the filmmaking process, which tends to place a greater emphasis on franchise potential than the actual story at hand. Driven by numbers, Delvin doesn’t pull any punches, before admitting that a fear of tarnishing the series is also a contributing factor.
“It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work independently. Listen, I think if we did Stargate right, the fans would like it and we could do something really good. But if we screw it up, they’ll reject it. As they should. But I kind of don’t want to do it if I think that we’ll screw it up, and that’s one of the things that’s holding us back. You’d have several studio’s involved and a lot of voices and, you know, you may make something great, but you also may have something that doesn’t resemble what you wanted to do.”
Since its debut, Stargate went on to spawn three live-action TV series, an animated spinoff, and scores of novels and comic books. They’re all housed up under the one universe, which has effectively been sentenced to the shelf for the foreseeable future.