I am – Hercules!!
AICN’s old pal Drew McWeeny is reporting exclusively on his fancy new HitFix site that Bryan Singer, director of the first two “X-Men” movies, “Superman Returns” and “Valkyrie,” is “nearing a deal” to produce and perhaps direct a new big-screen “Battlestar Galactica” movie.
I assume Drew got this directly out of the mouth of Singer’s “X-Men” producer Tom De Santo, who tirelessly pimped a Singer-De Santo revival of “Galactica” before Ron Moore took over the franchise, and seemed to begin again pimping a De Santo-led “Galactica” revival at last month’s Comic-Con.
De Santo, I’m guessing, pointed with great enthusiasm to the mammoth grosses J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” sopped up this summer, and I guess I could see Universal throwing a few sheckles at Singer to oversee the creation of a new “Battlestar” movie script.
But.
We’ve just spent four years watching Ronald D. Moore’s “Galactica” undertake its very cinematic search for Earth.
Could even the staunchest fans of the franchise be anxious already to see the Galactica crew begin that search anew?
By all accounts, any new feature would take place outside the alien-free “Galactica” universe created by Moore, and be based instead on the original 1978 Glen Larson series.
I can’t imagine Singer or the writers he hires coming up with a viable story angle Moore’s gang hasn’t recently explored. Moore himself said one of the reasons he decided to end “Galactica” was because the series was running out of ideas.
If I heard De Santo correctly at Comic-Con a few weeks ago, his pre-Moore series idea was to reveal that the genocidal Cylons were secretly taking their marching orders from humans. Other reports suggest De Santo wanted a Boxey-led colonial fleet to battle a borgified Apollo, who was apparently assimilated into the Cylon fleet via cybernetic implants.
From someone who says he read the "Galactica" backdoor pilot that DeSanto and Singer developed with writers Dan Angel & Billy Brown for Gail Berman at Fox:
I can't speak to the quality of the rest of the writers' work, but this script is some bullshit right here.
Had it not been udder shite, David Eick and Ron Moore would never have gotten the call when the project reverted to USA in the wake of Singer's departure to X2.
I know pretty much everything there is to know about this project. And it doesn't come close to what we've seen over the last four years.
I also wonder, given the relatively low ratings garnered by Moore’s excellent TV version, if there are enough core “Galactica” enthusiasts to support a pricey movie franchise at this point. And how would modern fans greet a new Galactica shorn of Laura Roslin, Bill Adama, Kara Thrace and Galen Tyrol?
I leave it, as always, to talkback. Are you, constant reader, ready to buy a ticket to a new Moore-free big-screen “Galactica”?
Find all of HitFix’s story on the matter here.
Follow Herc on Twitter
