It’s been a bad couple of years for explosion enthusiast Roland Emmerich. First, his gay rights drama Stonewall spawned accusations of whitewashing before being quickly forgotten by audiences. Then, his and frequent collaborator Dean Devlin’s Independence Day sequel, Resurgence, got blasted out of theaters by a giant laser beam of critical revulsion and audience indifference.
Now it sounds like Emmerich and Devlin’s plans to resurrect another one of their “I’ll Watch It If It’s On TNT” classics has also dried up. According to an interview Devlin recently gave to Empire, the Stargate reboot the production team has been floating since 2014 probably won’t be happening. “It looked good for a couple of months,” Devlin said. “But now it’s not looking so good.”
Originally released in 1994, Stargate eventually spawned three popular TV series and a bunch of spinoff movies, all of which Emmerich and Devlin intended to ignore when they brought the franchise back to theaters. “Listen,” Devlin told Empire. “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.” And while “fear of failure” is never a trait we’d attribute to one of the guys behind Godzilla (1998), if it saves us from the nostalgia blitz of Stargate: Reimagining (or whatever the movie was going to be called), we’ll take it.