After seemingly dying in a fit of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, Battlestar Galactica will suddenly awake in a tub of resurrection goo to find that it’s holding the hand of director Bryan Singer, who has been waiting for just this moment to take the sci-fi franchise under his wing and make it his own. Deadline reports that Singer will finally get his lifelong wish to craft his own version of Battlestar after more than a decade of false starts, including a flirtation with executive-producing the recent television revival. His feature film version—first mentioned back in 2009 as “a complete re-imagination” that will totally ignore that popular update and go back to the original 1978 TV series that he loved—is now being finalized at Universal with John Orloff attached to write the script.
Orloff most recently wrote Roland Emmerich’s “Shakespeare was a fraud and also BOOM! CANNONS!” historical epic Anonymous, as well as the Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole (the Henry VI of owl stories), while on the small screen he was Emmy nominated for his work on Band Of Brothers, so he definitely has some familiarity with heavy themes of war. Now he just has to put those themes on spaceships. Frustratingly, Singer still hasn’t justified rebooting the project so soon by sharing what will make his Battlestar Galactica different from the last Battlestar Galactica—which a lot of people kinda liked. But he did promise, “I love BSG, and I would pass on the job rather than frak it up,” so at least he’s speaking the fans’ language. Perhaps, unlike the somewhat grim Syfy version, his Battlestar Galactica will allow the robot dogs.