When plans were announced to revive Stargate, a wildly popular sci-fi franchise that has already been a film and three television series, cheers went up all over the internet. Then, seemingly after the last minute, the Amazon/MGM production was halted, and the applause turned to angry booing.
Unhappy fans got enough support from a crowdfunding effort focused on protesting the cancellation to fly a plane over Culver Studios on Tuesday, June 16, 2026.
The 1994 movie that began it all was a StudioCanal release that focused on an alien-created wormhole device that allowed for instantaneous travel across the cosmos. In 1997, Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner created a television series titled Stargate SG-1 as a sequel to the film. Next came the Stargate Atlantis series in 2004, then Stargate Universe in 2009, and a prequel web series, Stargate Origins, in 2018.
When Amazon Studios bought MGM, it got the rights to Stargate, and the recent creation of a new series had the fanbase very excited. “I was really looking forward to it,” said Alicia Ide of the Culver Arts Foundation. “The old shows are among my favorites; I re-watched one just recently, the whole series, start to finish. I’m deeply disappointed.”
The disappointment among the fans is combined with a ferocious distrust of the reasons that the studio gave for canceling a re-boot that, according to some sources, was already shooting in the United Kingdom. The work on the new show began in November of 2025. On June 2, Variety broke the news that Amazon/MGM was pulling the plug, citing the fear that the series would not hold much appeal beyond the fan-base.
Yahoo Entertainment stated that the “die-hard fanbase who has kept the franchise alive for over 30 years, filling multiple conventions each year, buying [all the] spin-offs,” should have been enough of a ready-made audience to see the project through to premier.
It is a long-time commitment with a huge demographic. Stargate fans are in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Australia, and Germany. According to Wikipedia, in 2010 Stargate was estimated to have injected $1 billion into the economy of British Columbia.
So, are the fans correct that they are being snubbed without reason? The seemingly strange logic of rebooting, hiring, casting, writing and filming – and then pulling the plug – looks like a waste of a great deal of money, time and talent.
While Stargate never had the numbers of a Star Trek or Star Wars fandom, a billion people here across the planet is quite an audience turn away from.
Judith Martin-Straw
