Before the release of Independence Day: Resurgence earlier this year, there was chatter about reviving another of writer/producer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich’s earlier projects, Stargate. The pair were involved in talks over a potential new collection of movies, that would go back to the start, and leave the hugely successful television franchise out of it.

However, Devlin has now revealed to Empire that the Stargate reboot is no more.

“It looked good for a couple of months, but now it’s not looking so good. There are just a lot of things that have to fire at the same time, and there was a moment where I thought it was all firing at the same time, and then it all kind of fell apart”, he said in the interview.

He attributes much of the blame to the current system of moviemaking, where everything is driven by numbers and a desire for the idea of a franchise without the same sort of attention being paid to the product itself.

“It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work independently,” he says. “Listen, I think if we did Stargate right, the fans would like it and we could do something really good. But if we screw it up, they’ll reject it. As they should. But I kind of don’t want to do it if I think that we’ll screw it up, and that’s one of the things that’s holding us back.”

The original Stargate was actually produced independently without the backing of a major studio, which granted the filmmakers an extraordinary amount of freedom. Today, Devlin notes, the situation would be very different: “You’d have several studio’s involved and a lot of voices and, you know, you may make something great, but you also may have something that doesn’t resemble what you wanted to do. That kind of ‘collaboration’ is a terrifying aspect of the whole thing.”

Taking on such a beloved franchise as Stargate is stuff and I can’t tell you how many times I wished they had just left titles alone. That coupled with just the general politics in the movie making industry. And possibly the box office performance of the new Independence Day film can’t have helped.

I’m still half hoping for the movie to pick up again just to see what they do with it, but as of now outlook looks bleak.