The year was 2011, and Stargate Universe was airing its final episodes on Syfy Channel.

SGU had been cancelled. The next SG-1 movie, Stargate: Revolution, had been cancelled. The promised Atlantis movie, Stargate: Extinction, had been cancelled. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had gone through a structured bankruptcy and come out the other side with new owners — owners who weren’t interested in Stargate.

And as the sun set on the Stargate franchise, executive producer Brad Wright took one last shot at giving the characters and the story some closure. He pitched a movie event that would bring characters from SG-1 and Atlantis together on a mission to rescue the lost crew of Destiny.

“I just started typing,” Wright told GateWorld in a new interview last week. He said that he made a pitch to MGM to make use of Stargate’s standing sets one last time before they were taken down and discarded. He said, “If I can get a script in your hands quickly enough, I bet I can get the cast of SGU and bring aboard enough cast members from the other show that I could at least give us a two-hour movie to wrap it up, or a 90-minute movie to wrap up SGU and finish the story that we were trying to tell.”

SGU ended after two years of a planned 5-year story, leaving the crew in stasis as the ship ran low on power between two galaxies.

It was a piece of news GateWorld reported on all the way back in 2011. But with the cancellation of Stargate Universe and the end of the franchise as we knew it, for many years the fact that a crossover movie was in the works went largely overlooked.

Wright confirmed that he did begin work on a crossover movie … but didn’t get very far before the door was closed for good.

“I pitched him the rough idea that I had for it – and it was rough,” he said. “I mean, I was typing as fast as I could. I didn’t whiteboard it. I just had this structure in my head and concept for the characters from the other series that I was going to bring in. And I started laying it out, and it started with McKay and began [with a] recognition that Destiny was in trouble.”

While Wright declined to expound on the plot details for the movie, it seems that it would have involved members of the Atlantis and SG-1 casts teaming up — perhaps with Lou Diamond Philips’ Colonel Telford? — to come up with a way to reach Destiny in the void between galaxies and bring her crew home.

Dr. Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) joined the crew in stasis in the final episode of SGU.

Before the details could be worked out and an actual first-draft script completed, however, the proposed budget evaporated and MGM declined to move forward. “Like two weeks into the process I found out it’s not gonna happen,” Wright said.

Back in April of 2011 he ended up on stage in front of a crowd of fans at the official Stargate convention. There he announced that the movie was officially dead, and he was cleaning out his office — having spent 17 years working at The Bridge Studios.

“There comes a time where the desire to finish something doesn’t line up with the financial resources to do it,” Wright told GateWorld. “And that was where it was already heading when I found out they’re not interested.”

But is this still the end of the road for the Stargate franchise, now in 2023 — and with a new studio taking ownership of the Stargate franchise? Wright expressed some optimism that the newly minted Amazon MGM Studios will do something new with Stargate.

“I’m very happy that it will continue,” he said. “I don’t know when it will continue or in what form — probably a movie. But I haven’t got a call yet even about that. So I’m as in the dark, but also [as] eager to see what happens as everybody else.”

Watch the full, 2-hour livestream with Brad Wright at GateWorld’s YouTube channel, or check out GateWorld’s 15-minute interview here: