When Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin developed STARGATE over twenty years ago (shit, really?), they had envisioned a trilogy of STARGATE films but "because of what happened with the rights and changes at the studio and all kinds of strange things, we never got to do parts two and three.” The STARGATE franchise continued to thrive however when Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner expanded the story to create Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: Universe, three live-action television series which spanned a combined total of seventeen seasons. Emmerich and Devlin always meant to finish telling their story however and several years ago they announced their plan to reboot the whole franchise with a fresh STARGATE trilogy.
Unfortunately it looks like that those plans didn't go quite as well as they had hoped as Dean Devlin recently told Empire Online that the whole project seems to have fallen apart.
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 points much of the blame at how the studios are approaching movie-making nowadays, where everything is "driven by numbers and a desire for the idea of a franchise without the same sort of attention being paid to the product itself." The original STARGATE was produced independently without a major studio calling the shots, which gave Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin much more freedom than they would have had otherwise. It would be a much different story had they made that film today as Devlin says they would have had "several studios 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. That kind of ‘collaboration’ is a terrifying aspect of the whole thing.” Devlin also doesn't want to go ahead without feeling confident that they won't screw it up; do it right, or don't do it at all. Where was that attitude when it came to INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE?
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.
Although t's been some time since I last watched the original STARGATE, I recall enjoying it and was keeping an open mind in regards to this rebooted trilogy. It doesn't strike me as any big loss that it may not happen now, but it'd probably be unwise to drive the final nail in the coffin. Stargate will be back, in one form or another.