Exclusive: Stargate Reboot Movie Aiming To Get Original Actors Back
According to our trusted and proven sources, Amazon wants to get the original cast back for a Stargate reboot.
We live in an age of legacy sequels. Since the idea of the “gritty reboot” grew passe, major franchises have been increasingly relying on a sequel that includes the original cast that audiences know and love (or some of them, anyway) and introduces a new, younger group of protagonists. According to our trusted and proven sources, Stargate is the latest major franchise to attempt this tricky move. Since the long-running science fiction series was recently acquired by a megacorporation with a strong competitive drive to produce content, it was inevitable that we would see a reboot soon. As it turns out, Amazon Prime Video will also be trying to get the original cast of Stargate back for a new project.
The original Stargate film was released in 1994, grossing an unexpected near-$200 million at the box office and turning the filmmaking team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin into hitmakers. It originally starred Kurt Russell, James Spader, and Jaye Davidson, none of whom reprised their roles for the many, many subsequent installments of the Stargate franchise. Kurt Russell played the grim military operative Colonel Jack O’Neil and was replaced in the following television series by Richard Dean Anderson (playing the same character with two L’s in O’Neill, for some reason). James Spader portrayed the archaeologist and linguist Dr. Daniel Jackson and was replaced by Michael Shanks. Jaye Davidson played the alien overlord Ra, who died in Stargate and would be unlikely to reappear in a reboot (plus, he is retired and hated being in the movie in the first place).
If Star Wars was not the first franchise to attempt the legacy sequel move with The Force Awakens, they were certainly the most successful. Star Trek had already done something similar with the Kelvin-timeline reboot movies, but the idea of new heroes meeting legacy characters who pass the responsibility of carrying the franchise definitely hit hard in the new Star Wars trilogy. It is unsurprising that Amazon Prime Video would have similar hopes for the Stargate franchise, especially considering it is known for having an unusually dedicated fan base, even by sci-fi standards.
Neither Kurt Russell nor James Spader has been involved in the Stargate franchise since the first movie, and bringing them back will create some interesting continuity issues. Given that Stargate has not yet dabbled in the multiverse concept that is all the rage these days, a reboot of Stargate including the original cast will either require SG-1 and the subsequent series to be declared non-canon, much like Disney did with Star Wars: Legends. However, many Stargate fans view the many, many hours of the series post-movie to be at least as important as the original.
That does leave the door open for Amazon Prime Video to use the decades-deep mythology of the Stargate television series, books, web series, comic books, and audiobooks (this franchise really had legs) as a vault of narratives and characters to pick and choose from, much as Lucasfilm is currently doing by bringing in characters from The Clone Wars and various other properties. Kurt Russell and James Spader, your Stargate move.
