It was just a few months ago that director Roland Emmerich and writer/producer Dean Devlin — the dynamic duo behind the original 1994 Stargate movie — were giving us some tantalizing tidbits about the planned reboot.

Originally meant as the first in a trilogy of films (which obviously never happened), the Stargate franchise went on to rule the television landscape for well over a decade when the movie spawned three TV series (in which Emmerich and Devlin were not involved) in Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007), its spinoff Stargate: Atlantis (2004-2009) and SGU Stargate Universe (2009-2011), with SG-1 getting two straight-to-DVD movies (The Ark of Truth and Continuum) after the series wrapped, both released in 2008. Plans were in place for more TV movies with the casts of SG-1 and Atlantis, but as you guys know, nothing ever came of it.

When Emmerich and Devlin announced they were rebooting Stargate with MGM and Warner Bros., fans were over the moon. We should have known it wouldn’t last, and in a new interview with Empire Online, Dean Devlin had some pretty bad news to share.

“It looked good for a couple of months, but now it’s not looking so good. There are just a lot of things that have to fire at the same time, and there was a moment where I thought it was all firing at the same time, and then it all kind of fell apart.”

So why did the Stargate remake/reboot fall through? Devlin puts the blame on today’s moviemaking system, which focuses on the numbers rather than the end product.

“It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work independently. Listen, I think if we did Stargate right, the fans would like it and we could do something really good. But if we screw it up, they’ll reject it. As they should. But I kind of don’t want to do it if I think that we’ll screw it up, and that’s one of the things that’s holding us back.”

Well, this is a huge bummer for Stargate fans everywhere, but I guess it’s better not to get a Stargate reboot if there's a chance they could screw this up, right? Just trying to convince myself here. What do you guys think? Are you disappointed that the planned reboot has now seemingly fallen by the wayside?

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(via Empire)