Planned Stargate Atlantis Movie We Never Got Has Been Revealed

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 26 seconds ago

Fans are feeling the loss of Stargate all over again following Amazon’s cancellation of the revival series while it was still in pre-production. Joseph Mallozzi, longtime writer for the franchise who wrote Stargate SG-1’s “Window of Opportunity,” “Wormhole X-Treme,” Stargate Atlantis “Enemy at the Gate,” and Stargate Universe’s “Incursion” two-parter with his longtime writing partner Paul Mullie, among many, many other acclaimed episodes, shared on X the scrapped plans for a Stargate Atlantis movie. Called Stargate: Extinction it would have served as a wrap-up movie for the series, and Mallozzi went into great detail for the fans. 

Joseph Mallozzi Pulls Back The Curtain On Stargate: Extinction

Stargate: Extinction would pick up after the end of Season 5, with Atlantis relocated to the Milky Way Galaxy and now resting on the surface of the Moon. Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) and Richard Woolsey (Robert Picardo) are among those who think the IOA is making a bad choice, but their pleas to keep fighting the Wraith in the Pegasus galaxy fall on deaf ears. Upon firing up the Stargate, everyone learns The Ancients put in a failsafe, and now, removed from the Pegasus Galaxy, the Stargate is rigged to explode. 

Woolsey “gets the band back together” as Mallozzi calls it, including John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan), Ronon (Jason Momoa), and Todd the Wraith (Sanctuary’s Christopher Heyerdahl), as they attempt to use the wormhole drive to reach Pegasus. It falls short, burning out some 300,000 light years away, leading up to “a high-flying adventure involving a mysterious civilization tapping the limitless potential of the accretion streams between two stars, time travel, and a race against time to avert not only the destruction of Atlantis but the extinction of an entire race.” That right there sounds fantastic, but Mallozzi goes even further, and highlighted two sequences that would leave fans screaming. 

One, involves Sheppard on the enemy mothership, with nowhere to run from the hordes of soldiers after him. He winds up in a storage room that contains stolen Atlantis tech. The camera would show the aliens lined up outside the door, ready to finish him off, when we hear thumping against the door. That’s when Sheppard emerges inside an Asgard exo-suit. All of a sudden, he’s not the one who’s trapped. 

The second featured Todd the Wraith facing off a Future Version of himself. They fight, argue over their philosophy, and then, at the last moment, Todd is saved by Rodney McKay. Alongside Sheppard, they fight together for the greater good while Carson Beckett (Paul McGillion) has the helm of Atlantis in a head-to-head battle against the mothership. Against the odds, they pull out a victory, and Atlantis is returned to the Pegasus Galaxy. 

The Death Of The DVD Was The End For Atlantis

That sounds incredible. Joseph Mallozzi explained that what happened was the bottom fell out of the DVD market and with it, the green light to make Stargate: Extinction. What Mallozzi and the rest of the talented crew in the writer’s room put together is the send off that the series deserved. Stargate SG-1 had a series of direct-to-DVD movies to wrap up the battle against the Goa’uld, and while the movie didn’t finish the fight against the Wraiths, it would have solved the gigantic cliffhanger from Season 5, while setting up the crew for more adventures. 

Instead, Atlantis was canceled and any plans for a follow up film or Season 6 went with it. Mallozzi and Mullie went on to create Dark Matter, one of the best SyFy original shows, while Stargate was put on the backburner following the end of Stargate Universe. Someday Amazon, the current rights holder for the franchise, will decide to bring it back, and do it right, but after the last sudden cancelation it doesn’t look good. Until then, fans have their memories, and three great shows that are all available for rewatching right now, while we dream over what could have been.