New StarGate series Prime Video.
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The New Stargate Series Will Take A While
With a writers' room assembling in January, series creator Martin Gero says that longsuffering fans should expect production to last around two years.
Stargate fans are ecstatic about the announcement that a new series is finally in the works, continuing the franchise for a new generation of fans. Amazon MGM Studios revealed last month that Stargate Atlantis veteran Martin Gero is creating the show for Prime Video, where it will stream globally.
On the heels of the recent news that the writers’ room will convene in the L.A. area in January, Gero has given us a better sense of the production’s timetable — and just when we might see the show on our screens.
“We’re starting the writers’ room on the other side of the year,” Gero told GateWorld and Dial the Gate. “These things take about two years, give or take. It might be a little shorter, it might be a little longer — hopefully it’s not longer. Just to set everybody’s expectations, it’s going to be a minute. We wanted to announce early because we didn’t want it to leak. … It had been 20 or 30 people inside the company that had known about it, and to make a show you have to hire 400 people! … We wanted fans to hear it from us, and not from a leak.”
Given the typical pattern of modern streaming series, we had speculated that if the new show was ready to go before cameras in 2026 it likely would not premiere before 2027. With the creative team assembling early next year, that debut window is now looking like it might be late 2027 or 2028. Long-time fans of the franchise are already 14 years into its hiatus, of course, so hopefully the new series will be worth waiting a little while longer — with new characters, new antagonists, and a story that is worthy of Stargate.
A longer production calendar gives Amazon plenty of time to localize episodes (including voiceovers in multiple languages) for a simultaneous global release. And, of course, it also allows the show to go big with its visual effects ambitions.
“We have resources that we haven’t had before,” Gero said. “We’re talking to some of the biggest visual effects houses in the world … but that work takes time. It’s a gift to not have to turn around a shot in three weeks, [but] to have in some cases a year to build out a sequence.”
Details about the show’s plot, setting, characters, and even the final title are still a closely guarded secret. Gero suggested that they are aiming for a 10-episode first season, but declined to commit to that when pressed. “I’m just focused on making one great season now,” he said. “Obviously it’s not a limited series. We want it to be a bunch! But my main concern right now is just making 10 episodes that everyone is going to want a second season for. … I think we can talk more about [the final episode count] at a later date.”
Gero also revealed that he has been at work on some version of a Stargate pitch for much longer than the current iteration has been gestating, as far back as 2016. “We had a general [meeting] with MGM, and I made a case for what I thought the show should be back then,” he said. But working for MGM at the time would have been complicated by Gero’s studio development deal, which at that time was at Warner Bros. “We had had some initial talks very, very early — but it just felt like it wasn’t going to work. And then I heard Brad [Wright] was working on something … for Peacock. And then I moved my deal over from Warner Bros. to Universal, who is the parent company of Peacock, and so they started talking to me about … potentially doing Stargate.
“I got to read Brad’s incredible script, and we started talking about it. Even then we had started talking about an early iteration of what this would eventually be.” But eventually the people who had commissioned Wright’s Stargate script were no longer there, and around 2020 or 2021 Gero, Wright, and Joseph Mallozzi briefly considered starting something new. But MGM’s decision to sell the studio to Amazon put the brakes on further development.
“Sure enough, when my deal at Universal was up I was going around seeing what was available,” Gero said. “And Amazon essentially said, ‘Hey, we know you have a history with the franchise. Is this something you would be interested in? Have you thought about it?’ And I was like, ‘I’ve actually thought about it so much! I would love to talk about this!'”
Gero was in negotiations by the end of 2023, and had an initial development deal closed by June of 2024. He said that the long period of silence after the Amazon-MGM deal was completed in 2022 was not due to any lack of interest inside the company.
“To their credit, Amazon had already identified Stargate as a prime candidate for a TV show,” Gero said. “They’re just a very secretive company. They’re a tech company. So the fact that you didn’t hear anything isn’t about their enthusiasm — it was about them internally trying to figure out what to get right.”
Be sure to watch the full, hour-long conversation with Martin Gero below, or over on GateWorld and Dial the Gate on YouTube. Gero also talks about landing the job on Atlantis as a young writer, his subsequent work on shows like Blindspot and Quantum Leap — and why Blindspot is canonical to the Stargate universe! We will continue to cover the very latest on the new production in the months ahead.
I was expecting a 2027 premiere anyway. Ten episode seasons is also in line with my expectations, though I thought it'd be closer to eight.
None of this is surprising.
so, July 27th 2027.. 30th anniversary. Get it done!!
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