It's about frakkin' time: Simon Kinberg has provided an update on the status of his upcoming Battlestar Galactica movie for Universal.
It's been over 10 years since the SYFY reboot concluded its four-season run, and to this day, the franchise remains a fixture in the minds of sci-fi and TV drama fans alike. The show was briefly followed up by a prequel web series, Blood & Chrome, which was significantly less successful and wound up airing as a TV movie, but since then there's been some movement around potential future ideas. A new series was announced as being in development for the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock back in 2019 with Sam Esmail set to produce, but as of last year, the pilot was still in the works. However, a film adaptation of the original 1978 series has been in the works almost since the SYFY show ended, and as of 2020, it was confirmed that Kinberg had been tapped to write and produce the movie alongside Dylan Clark (Rise of the Planet of the Apes).
In an interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub for his upcoming film The 355, Kinberg confirmed that the BSG movie is continuing to move forward, saying that a second draft for the film's script is now finished — although they're still a ways off from rolling. In Kinberg's words:
"We are in the process of going out to directors and the hope is to attach a director and start prepping the movie this year. It's a megillah, humongous film and the prep will be a very long prep period so I would imagine even if we attached a director today it would take six, nine months to prep this movie properly. So at the earliest, we'd be shooting at the end of this year. We'd probably be shooting at the beginning of next year. Time will tell who the director is and then you or someone else will tell who the director is."
However, if fans were wondering whether the movie and the planned Peacock show would exist in two separate canons, Kinberg also confirmed that the properties are a lot more linked than we may have originally thought:
"In terms of the situation with Sam and the show, I can't say too much about it other than there is synergy between the two enterprises and constant communication between us. We've become close and been having a really good time together and there will be, for lack of a better phrase and it's an overused phrase, a shared universe."
As for whether the movie itself will tie into the previous series, Kinberg admitted that he wasn't allowed to say much, but did divulge some details for us: "There are connections, but it is certainly not simply a continuation or a remake of Ron Moore's masterpiece."
Stay tuned for more from our interview with Kinberg soon and you can read everything Sam Esmail told us about the new TV series here, including how he hopes to change up the form of how television gets released.