Tonight’s Twitterstorm Hopes To Revive Stargate On TV

Stargate fans are gearing up their zat guns and Jaffa staff weapons to take one more run at MGM, hoping to encourage the studio to green-light a new Stargate series through an online social media campaign. The “Stargate Superdrive” tweet storm is set for tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern / 6 p.m. Pacific time.

Spearheaded by former Stargate writer-producer Joseph Mallozzi (who is under assault by a Goa’uld invasion in the video below), the campaign aims to demonstrate to the studio that owns the Stargate franchise that the fan base for the venerable science fiction franchise is still active and hungry for new content.

In particular, it’s asking for a new show set in the established television universe, created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner when Stargate SG-1 premiered in 1997. Wright then went on to co-create Stargate Atlantis (2004) and Stargate Universe (2009) with Robert C. Cooper, who started as a writer and script supervisor on SG-1.

Together the three television series and two direct-to-DVD movies span 17 seasons and more than 350 episodes.

Not only does Stargate’s fan base number in the millions and span continents, but countless new fans have been discovering Jack O’Neill, Teal’c, Rodney McKay, Eli Wallace, and the rest of the teams through DVD and digital streaming in the years since the shows were made.

GET YOUR #HASHTAG ON

Fans all over the world are encouraged to participate in tonight’s event using a unique campaign hashtag — to be announced a few minutes before the hour. The time selected has been optimized for North America, and a second campaign will be scheduled for a later date, optimized for fans in Europe.

Concentrating all activity within a single hour, and using only one common hashtag, will help to drive total impressions and hopefully get the campaign trending on the social media platform. Participants joining in with the campaign and the celebration of Stargate’s legacy are asked to use only this hashtag on tweets during the hour, as apparently Twitter’s algorithms for trending topics ignores tweets that use multiple hashtags.

Publicly available reports on total tweets, impressions, and user engagement across Twitter can then be shared with the studio’s decision-makers.

Folks who are new to Twitter can create a new account for free, and upload a profile picture (you don’t want to look like a bot, do you?) to get ready for the 9 p.m. ET start.

Mallozzi also organized a Twitter campaign in the spring of 2018, generating more than 100,000 tweets and some 76 million total timeline impressions across Twitter. And while MGM did not respond to that campaign publicly, executives and employees there certainly did notice.

As with that event, tonight is sure to see some online appearances by former Stargate and Dark Matter cast and crew.

And — as if new Stargate wasn’t its own reward — there are prizes! Mallozzi will also give away some one-of-a-kind collector’s items from both shows, including scripts, original art department packages, crew gifts, and more.

IS NEW STARGATE REALISTIC?

Brad Wright has reportedly been in talks with MGM for more than a year now, though the studio remains mum on what might come of it.

When production on the Stargate franchise shut down back in 2011, he had been pitching a crossover film that reportedly would use cast members from all three shows to tie up loose ends and offer fans some kind of resolution.

“That was (part of) the plot of the script I was writing when I tried to convince MGM to make a direct to video movie to properly end the SGU story,” Wright said in early 2018. “MGM said no before I could finish it.”

A decade ago additional movies for SG-1 and Atlantis very nearly came to be, until numerous market forces conspired against them. “We tried,” he said during a Reddit AMA in 2018. “We wrote scripts. The bottom of the DVD market went away and MGM asked us to put it on hold. Then, MGM went into bankruptcy and that was that.”

In the years since, MGM has reorganized under entirely new leadership. The physical media market for home video is a fraction of what it once was — but Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have carved out a brand new distribution model with online streaming.

The most recent word from MGM regarding the Stargate franchise came in the form of the announced closure of Stargate Command, MGM’s official Web site and digital streaming platform for all things Stargate. That came at the end of October, with the service set to shut down at the end of this month.

That does not mean that development on a new production isn’t still continuing apace behind closed doors. But it does mean that anything new coming from the studio would not live isolated on the studio’s own niche service, as the 10-part Web series Stargate Origins did when it was released in early 2018.

What’s needed is the studio’s commitment, a budget, the participation of a creative like Wright … and a streaming or broadcast partner to help fund a new Stargate show, and to give it a home where even more new viewers will discover it.

Ready to storm? Head over to Twitter and follow the two accounts below to make sure you see the campaign hashtag and additional instructions later tonight. (And follow @GateWorld while you’re at it!) Then let @MGMTelevision and @MGM_Studios know — politely and enthusiastically — that you want new Stargate.

On Twitter: @BaronDestructo, @StargateNow