Sigourney Weaver isn’t giving up on the possibility of Galaxy Quest finally getting the series treatment it deserves. In an interview with Collider, she says that there is some movement going on behind the scenes to get the project back in the works.
Galaxy Quest is a 1999 sci-fi comedy that lovingly skewered the Star Trek franchise: the cast of a Star Trek-like show is beamed aboard an actual spaceship by aliens who watched the series and didn’t understand that it wasn’t real.
Fans were devastated by the tragic loss of Alan Rickman in 2016 — he played Leonard Nimoy homage Alexander Dane; plans for a Galaxy Quest series were put on hold after his death. There is still a path forward for the show, though, and Weaver insists that the cast is ready to take up the call if and when the time comes.
According to Weaver, writer Bob Gordon and producer Mark Johnson started putting together plans for a series in 2015. “We lost the wonderful Alan unexpectedly, so that was put in mothballs, but I think they are finally now reviving it.”
Sigourney Weaver says a lot of material was cut from Galaxy Quest
Aside from being one of the most amazing sci-fi movies ever made, Weaver says there was also a lot of material cut from the original film that the cast wants to see come to life. There had been a sequel that never came about, so the material is there and ready to go:
"They were in the middle of reviving it. First of all, there was another script. There was a sequel written by our writer, Bob Gordon. The movie was so witty, and when they released it, DreamWorks cut a lot of the wittiest scenes because they wanted to put it out as a children’s movie at Christmas. I think that was disappointing for everybody, so he decided not to let them have the second one."
Weaver says that the show would be based around the old crew coming together with a new crew, passing the baton, as it were. So kind of a Star Trek: The Original Series vs Star Trek: The Next Generation angle. She knows that finding a way to work around Rickman won’t be easy. “He’s irreplaceable, eternally,” she said. “How they will find someone to play Alan’s part, don’t know, but I think that they have a very good idea of who to do it.”
One thing is for sure: Sigourney Weaver knows how things work and she wouldn’t say anything about the project if there wasn’t truth to it, so that means fans have permission to start getting excited that the Galaxy Quest series could be coming to life at some point.
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h/t The A.V. Club