Stargate Reboot Will Begin A Planned Trilogy

Roland Emmerich, who wrote and directed the original 1994 Stargate film starring Kurt Russell and James Spader, now wants to make it again—and then some. Emmerich and his longtime producing partner Dean Devlin are developing a reboot of the film that will finally allow them to tell the story as they had originally planned back in the 1990s, before the rights were sold off to make the long-running Stargate TV series.

As Devlin recently told Variety, the original Stargate concept called for a sequel. "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," he explained, and went on to point out that because of the passage of time, doing right by their fundamental vision for the franchise means starting over from scratch: "It's not a story that can take place 20 years later. So the only way to really tell that trilogy is to go back from the beginning and start the story all over again."

In the original film, a military research team is transported to a distant planet inhabited by people with a culture eerily similar to that of Earth's ancient Egyptians. Since the release of Stargate, Devlin has spoken quite openly about the sequels that could have been. The follow-ups would have dealt with different mythologies originating on other planets. According to remarks Devlin made in 2006, the overarching story of the trilogy would have been the reveal that "all mythologies are actually tied together with a common thread that we haven't recognized before."