So, a Babylon 5 reboot may be in the works.
Speaking at San Diego Comic Con last week, Straczsynki announced that he would soon be sitting down to write a Babylon 5 feature film, which is envisioned as a reboot of the iconic sci-fi series. JMS said that he plans to get the script locked down by the end of 2015 and the film would then enter production the following year in 2016.
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Babylon 5 Movie to "Enter Production" in 2016
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Boxzy on Friday August 08 2014, @06:23AM
Getting so sick of the word reboot now, this sucks. Just stop puking all over my childhood and the great history of scifi. If the industry is so washed up they should move on.
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 2) by bd on Friday August 08 2014, @07:20AM
I agree.
Maybe it is because I am not a big comic book fan, but reboots are even more annoying to me than this Hollywood illness of producing Die Hard XLVI instead of a new story, because a new story could be a flop...
Never the less, at least it is done by JMS, who has proven to be able to make a very very decent science fiction universe in the past. These days, I would be happy if there is any kind of decent science fiction that does not devolve into a lame action flick.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Friday August 08 2014, @07:28AM
I think the idea of a reboot is not inherently broken - humanity has always enjoyed the retelling of favourite stories, even with the occasional mutation. The problem is that Hollywood and Disney and co have realised that franchises and retellings are the 'safe' approach to film making and so have stopped innovating at the expense of preexisting treasured works. And also remember, these are the same jerks who won't let anything they've ever produced lapse in copyright, so nobody else can retell -their- tales.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by monster on Friday August 08 2014, @10:09AM
Actually reboots are much worse for comic book fans: Fans tend to "fill the gaps" in the stories and form a clear view of them and their characters, but reboots usually destroy that to allow the filmmakers/new directors "creative freedom" (aka converting them into generic stereotypes instead of what made them unique).
Just one example: The recent movies with/about Wolverine have turned what used to be a short, ugly sonofabitch who would rip your guts without even blinking but had a samurai-like code of honor because of a whole background of loss and fighting against his own destructive instincts, into a handsome, campy, smartassed tough-in-the-outside-but-gentle-inside guy with and attitude problem. While the latter is no doubt easier to show to non-fans, it also makes him rather generic: You could say exactly the same of most movie heroes in the last twenty years.
That doesn't make the actual movies bad, but for many fans it clearly puts them in the same territory of those "never-be-named" Matrix sequels or the SW prequels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @07:31AM
Normally I would agree with you but JMS seems to be one of the few writers who takes their own work seriously enough. While I remain sceptical (I'd have preferred a prequel covering the Earth Membari war or a sequel dealing with the continued politics of the galaxy) in a "reboot" of the franchise (what was wrong with it the first time round?) I'm hopeful that if JMS is doing it then he is doing it for a reason other than "da money".
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 08 2014, @08:28AM
The big thing I can think of is the way the network execs couldn't make their tiny little minds up and so he had to wrap up the main story by the end of season 4 and then suddenly had a 5th season to fill. He might want to re-do that.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Friday August 08 2014, @07:08PM
The network that was carrying season 4 was going bankrupt. That's why he had to wrap up everything by the end of season 4. Then, unexpectedly, in the final days of season 4, another network showed up and funded a season 5.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 08 2014, @11:59PM
The show was produced by Warner Brothers. They had the resources to keep it going (including another network they were partnered in). The decision was theirs to make, they weren't depending on an outside decision maker. They just didn't make the decision in time.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 08 2014, @04:12PM
They already did that in a movie. [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 08 2014, @07:34AM
ust stop puking all over [...] the great history of scifi.
And Babylon 5!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 08 2014, @10:29AM
I agree. They'd better not touch Quark, he was my favorite Babylon 5 character!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @01:54PM
I am not inherently against this. B5 is decent *for its time*. But the low budget quality of the sets is really starting to show. I tried watching it again and didnt make it past season 2.
He also had to butcher season 4 and 5 because he was unsure of the budget.
It was good dont get me wrong. But it could have been better. Plus the actors are dropping like flies.
They could make some seriously epic space battles now with the CGI we have now compared to the a500's they were using.
And they better have a decent Garibaldi and Londo. In fact just use them again. They were seriously good in those roles.
I really liked the show and made sure my VCR caught every episode and I bought every DVD. But a 'reboot' that could be interesting. I could go for some more b5 stories.
But zatharas says nope not the one.
(Score: 1) by LegendaryTeeth on Friday August 08 2014, @02:10PM
I dunno, for B5 I could see it, due to all the executive meddling they had to overcome during the original run. Tell the "real story", as it were. Though I really like ol' Bruce Boxleitner, pulling off the Sinclair arc across the entire 5 seasons would have been AMAZING. How much foreshadowing in season one didn't quite pay off due to the switch?
Still, I'd rather see a sequel or something in the future.
On the OTHER hand, this might result in some really HQ Omega Class Destroyer models, and renew interest enough to get them modded into all these upcoming space sims, and that would make me very happy indeed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rivenaleem on Friday August 08 2014, @02:16PM
I like much of what BSG offered, it took a turn somewhere along the way and became quite poor, but definitely the first season was very enjoyable.
I'm okay with the concept of a reboot, insofar as it picks up where the old left off, and is not a re-imagining (see spiderman movies).
What if Netflix produced new Firefly, in all its shininess, would you call that a reboot? What if someone decided to make more new Star Gate? What if SG:U was rebooted, and some of the issues buffed out of it. I felt it had great potential.
I'm cautious (worried is too strong a word) that they might consider something along the same lines as George Lucas, and think "Imagine the Babylon 5 show we could make now that CGI is so much cheaper! We wouldn't have to rely on good acting and story so much!"
But JMS has always, long before twitter and other social outlets existed, engaged with the fans and viewers, even doing an interview for /. last year or so. I'm optimistic that if he is in control, we could actually get something quite enjoyable.
Is it really reboots you don't like or re-imaginings?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 08 2014, @03:40PM
JMS was quite engaged with fans on Usenet back in the day. The BBS's were always hopping with people parsing his latest hints about upcoming episodes. I remember the thread divining the meaning of "there is a hole in your mind" quite clearly. A surprising number actually guessed the correct meaning.
I do think JMS should up the ante this time. Instead of one linear plot with subplots embedded, he ought to flesh out the subplots as parallel story lines that intersect with the main trunk, and which you the viewer can detour down instead of following the main line. Imagine the buzz on social media while those fans who followed G'Kar's story that week chatted with those who followed Mollari's. You could also have fan-influenced components through voting or suggestion boxes that the writers can riff off of. It would be like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure on steroids. It would be highly engaging, it would be immune to pirating (because it's co-created with the audience), and boy would it have legs. Imagine the spin-offs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @03:49PM
What do you mean "What if"? Its already happening. [cinemablend.com] In fact, it had been planned for at least a decade, but they wanted to wait for the TV series to finally end before making Stargate 2 and 3, and have instead decide to just redo it from movie 1 so that people don't think its in the same continuity as the TV series (even though Stargate already has a firmly established set of infinite parallel universes).
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Saturday August 09 2014, @08:47PM
I didn't know about this. Thanks for the heads up! I'm currently re-watching SG-1 since it recently arrived on Netflix (Ireland) and I never really managed to catch every show in the past, missing some from time to time. The opportunity to watch it all in sequence is great. Hope I'm done before new movies come along!
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday August 08 2014, @06:19PM
If the industry is so washed up they should move on.
Or they could try turning it off and on-again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04 2014, @10:20AM
LaQVBW http://www.qs3pe5zgdxc9iovktapt2dbyppkmkqfz.com/ [qs3pe5zgdxc9iovktapt2dbyppkmkqfz.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Friday August 08 2014, @07:55AM
That they have to reboot everything? It's remake this, reboot that, irrelevant sequel there, and so on. I don't remember such things being quite as prevalent twenty, thirty years ago. Sure, films have been made before but not quite as much as today where every other film in the theatres these days is a remake of some sort. A search for the keyword 'remake' in IMDB shows a surfeit of such things from the 2000s on. Hollywood looks like the proverbial snake eating its own tail as a result.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @09:00AM
I don't know, what exactly new can you come up with? There's already a million stories about aliens, wars, romance, robots (good and bad), diseases( both natural and human made), zombies, vampires, other monsters, fantasy etc etc.
I guess the fantasy category is something that's the least used in movies (atleast if you limit that to LOTR type of fantasy). You could make some awesome movies about that, though the stories would be very much like they've been in other categories too, war, monsters and romance with different looking chars.
I can't really blame hollywood for not coming up with new ideas, what i can blame them is for fucking up the movies with their totally idiotic physics and "cool" looking stunts, which are not cool, just stupid.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday August 08 2014, @09:44AM
I believe GP was talking more about the unending stream of existing creations (movies, TV shows, comics, etc.) being rehashed, rather than the underlying ideas, plots, or creature types.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @10:54AM
Well he does say reboots and remakes. I can understand the critisism on remakes for the most part (there are maybe few exceptions, atleast there is a slight, slight chance that a remake is actually better), but reboots i see as just extending that known universe, and as i said, coming up with something complitely new is starting to get more and more difficult.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Jiro on Friday August 08 2014, @02:54PM
Actors age. You have a choice: reboot it, recast everyone without rebooting, or have almost 20 years take place in the series' world. This isn't like comic books where the characters are exactly as old as everyone has drawn them.
And even ignoring that, with the passage of so many years, enough people are alive who haven't seen the original that you can't just make a sequel without alienating a large part of your audience.
There's really no option aside from rebooting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 09 2014, @02:55AM
> There's really no option aside from rebooting.
Hello, McFly?
There is one very obvious option - tell a brand new story!
And don't give me any of that Campbellian shit about there only being about 5 stories that we just keep telling over and over again. That's still no excuse to actively rehash the same characters and plotlines instead of coming up with new ones.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Popeidol on Friday August 08 2014, @09:59AM
The same reason they put everything into franchises: Rebooting means you have a minimum guaranteed fanbase. It's also why rebooting causes so much anger; Whatever they've decided to reboot is usually of higher-than-average quality and so the reboot has a very good chance of not standing up to the original.
A lot of reboots and franchised movies start with existing scripts that fit the requirements. However good it is, that script about political and military drama on a ship in deep space is going to get a lot more viewers if you rename a few characters and label it 'Star Trek: Crisis Time' or 'Babylon 5 mk II' (though that's not what happened here).
I'll see it because I loved Babylon 5 and I'm interested to see what Straczysnki can do with a decent budget. Which I guess demonstrates my point?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Friday August 08 2014, @01:18PM
Could call it Babylon 6
(Score: 2) by tempest on Friday August 08 2014, @01:24PM
"This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations... no wait, we forgot one!"
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Friday August 08 2014, @07:15PM
Well, there's the entire story of Babylon 4 (remember, the Babylon that disappeared into the past to fight a war?) that was, I was once told, part of the original plan tor a ten-year TV show.
And there's the whole plot of Crusade, which he's been saying for along time he wants to get back to.
It's not as if he has to savage the original story to add to it. I doubt that he would -- he has so much that he still wants to tell.
(Score: 1) by TestablePredictions on Friday August 08 2014, @08:02PM
Twenty or thirty years ago everything was sequels. But with all the same basic characteristics and complaints that we'd make about reboots: all new actors, largely different look'n'feel, reckless continuity errors, etc...
As the quality of sequels began to improve, Hollywood had to find a new lazy way to make a quick buck. What they found was reboots.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @12:29PM
and please make it the (hobbit + lord of rings) x 3 looong! : )
(Score: 1) by ACELLC on Friday August 08 2014, @12:46PM
They ruined BSG, STTOS, and pretty much every other groundbreaking, original Sci-Fi story. I guess they won't feel complete until they've ruined the best of the breed.
I can't believe JMS agreed to do this. I'm a life long fan of capitalism and I'm painfully familiar with paying bills but there are limits.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday August 08 2014, @03:01PM
JMS is an awfully good show runner, and has enough cachet that he can limit much of the meddling and committee-ism that screws up shows, and retain personal creative control. If he can do that again, it could be good. He also can learn from the past. He's had twenty years and a lot of input to help figure out what worked best in the original B5 and what didn't work so well (that season where he burned himself out by writing every script, for example).
Who knows. The series was an awfully good ride for 5 years. I'm happy to give him another shot at a new view of it. If it ends up sucking, people just won't watch it.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Friday August 08 2014, @07:18PM
He even shut down an ongoing show rather than let network executives meddle with it. He's got the balls he needs.
(Score: 1) by azrael on Friday August 08 2014, @01:56PM
Must also confess to the worry it might tarnish the B5 memories.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 08 2014, @03:04PM
Most of the B5 movies are terrible so a good one would be great : ) It could get people rewatching the original series too. A lot of people never heard of Firefly until watching the Serenity movie. Who doesn't love a good Sheridan speech anyways?
It seems like a lot of people here do not want a reboot or remake or any additional content to the B5 universe. They can just ignore this movie like all the others, hah. I have a feeling this "reboot" will be mostly taking place in the B5 universe and not centered around the show's main characters. We'll obviously get some fan-service though. Ivanova will have a scene alluding to a same-sex relationship. Someone will tell Bester that he's an asshole. Zathrus will show up just to mumble and carry something heavy. To any muggles these scenes will just look like short glimpses at interesting characters but the significance will be lost.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 08 2014, @03:50PM
For me the relationship and scenes between G'Kar and Mollari made the show. Even at the very end, after the Shadow War arc had run its course and the last season was petering out, their death scene retained an energy that had faded from the other characters. That nuance and complexity, the genuine friendship mixed with deep hatred, was compelling.
Of course JMS's ability to layer in subtle humor along the way, such as the scenes with Zathras, added a lot, too.
The movies that followed and the attempted series continuation with the Rangers fell quite flat, though. So I wonder if they can recreate the special sauce they had in B5. I hope they can. B5 was some of the finest sci-fi I've ever seen.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 08 2014, @06:11PM
They were certainly entertaining : ) I think one of my favorites was during the Narn occupation. G'Kar and Mollari get stuck in an elevator together. G'Kar is so delighted that they will be killed and does nothing to help escape. Just remembering his smile and laugh as he chokes to death on smoke is great (in an odd way!). G'Kar monologues were fantastic. He transformed so much over the course of the show.
You are right though that there were deep and complex relationships.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 08 2014, @04:19PM
Personally, I didn't. After you hear the first three, they all kind of blur together. "Bad guys blah blah unjust blah blah stand up to them blah blah even though we don't have a chance blah blah personal responsibility blah blah destiny in the stars!"
And you could always tell when they were coming because he'd strike a pose and his eyes would flash. Then I'd roll my eyes and wait for it to finish so we can get back to him batting eyelashes at D'Lenn and wanking around with Mimbari culture that I got tired of after season 2. Meanwhile Garibaldi is strutting around somewhere being pointless, too.
Er...I mean...it was a good show? Now we don't have any sci fi at all on TV anymore :(
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Koen on Friday August 08 2014, @09:32PM
Indeed, the only decent B5 movie was "In the beginning", all others sucked. Most of all "Thirdspace": trying to work out the rise and fall of an even more fearsome enemy than the Shadows in the span of a double episode was ridiculous.
B5 missed some good opportunities to make interesting movies, such as the further adventures of Lennier or of G'Kar & Lyta Alexander.
Anyway, I'm watching the original series now with my daughter, we're enjoying it both very much. The first 4 seasons are have an amazing story - what I like most about it is the humans and their allies banning both the angels (Vorlon) and demons (Shadows) from this world. And Londo is the greatest tragic hero of SF.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday August 08 2014, @10:38PM
I saw the show and movies during their original run, and even "In the Beginning" fell a bit short of my expectations. Partly my fault because I'd read the novel first which had excellent scenes that weren't in the movie (may have been author's creation, rather than cut from script), the other was that the CGI was sub-par for its time and was borderline cartoonish in both looks and physics. The new SFX company they started using in Season 4 just couldn't measure up to their predecessor.
I actually preferred the reused season 2 footage with CGI (scene where Delenn says, "They fight bravely. They know they cannot harm us, but they continue to try"), it just *looked* more real.
(Score: 1) by AgTiger on Friday August 08 2014, @03:04PM
I love the old B5 series; I enjoy watching it to this day. I'm normally against reboots, but in this case, it might make sense to start with a movie, and hopefully springboard to the entire series being redone.
The old series can't be updated or continued; much has transpired since 20 years ago.
On Screen:
Behind the scenes:
PS: Question to the Soylent News editors: Why does the <br> tag not insert line-breaks properly?
(Score: 1) by bitshifter on Friday August 08 2014, @05:28PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday August 09 2014, @04:39PM
If they are going to do a reboot that has follows the normal pattern of having nothing to do with the original then PLEASE do B5:Crusade and do it right.
However, personally I would love to see the telepath-war, and it could be done with basically only Bester, Talia (for backstory) and Lyta from the main series (or for that matter, do a show on what happened to Lyta during the first two season of B5).
Maybe also following up on Lennier or Vir could be interesting, there was so much that happened "off screen" or was implied or was left unfinished that can be resolved without involving the main B5 (such all of the smaller races, the narn/centauri conflicts, earth's expansion from right before meeting centauri up until they pissed of the minbari).
And now when I think about it, following Narn's re-exploration and re-building and its travels and exploits could also have a lot of potential.
In short - B5 has a lot of things unexplored but if something is to be remade that bears no resemblance to the original then do B5:Crusade properly