According to a report from TV Wise, Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski
will shortly begin work on a rebooted big-screen version of his 1990s sci-fi TV
series. Straczynski made the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con last week.

Babylon 5’s pilot episode originally aired in 1993, with the series beginning
its regular run almost a year later as a foundational component of the now-
defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network. The show lacked the production budget
of its contemporary rival Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (which allegedly lifted some
or all of its core concepts directly from Straczynski’s original—and rejected—
Babylon 5 pitch meeting with Paramount). Still, it attracted enough of an
audience to accomplish a noteworthy feat: Babylon 5 became the only non-Star
Trek science fiction show on American television to reach its series completion
without being cancelled. Not until 2004’s Battlestar Galactica reboot would
another non-Star Trek show earn the same distinction.

After Babylon 5 ended in 1998, Straczynski (usually referred to simply by his
initials, "JMS") tried multiple times to bring a B5 movie to theaters. The most
recent attempt in 2004 came the closest, with a completed script and some
preproduction work underway, but without financial backing from Warner Bros.
the project had to be abandoned.

In the intervening years, JMS has worked on other projects in a variety of
media, including comics, television, and film; he shares a writing credit on
the film adaptation of World War Z, though not much from his draft made it to
the final Brad Pitt-produced film. The last time Babylon 5 appeared on a screen
of any sort was as 2007’s The Lost Tales, a direct-to-DVD project made up of
two episode-length vignettes set in the Babylon 5 universe after the end of the
main series.

According to JMS’s latest announcement, the new script will be targeted at a
2016 theatrical release and will be a reboot of the series rather than a
continuation. This is necessary for both dramatic and practical purposes—the
series was in regular production from 1994-1998, and the cast has simply aged
too far to credibly play themselves again during the series’ main timeline.
Additionally, several of the foundational cast members—Michael O’Hare, Andreas
Katsulas, Richard Biggs, and Jeff Conaway—have passed away.

However, JMS reportedly said he would attempt to use the original cast members
in whatever ways he could, including potentially having series anchor Bruce
Boxleitner play the president of the Earth Alliance (though as B5 fans know,
exactly which president JMS is talking about would have a tremendous impact on
Boxleitner’s role).

The movie rights to the Babylon 5 property remain in JMS’s hands, but the
creator is hopeful that this time around, Warner Bros. will choose to finance
the film instead of passing on it. Nonetheless (at least according to TV Wise),
JMS is prepared to fund the movie through his own production company if
necessary—something that wasn’t a possibility ten years ago—suggesting that B5
will in fact come to the big screen at last.

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