Saturday 31 August 2024
Brandon Sanderson achieves another Kickstarter success
Wednesday 28 August 2024
New Guy Gavriel Kay novel confirmed for 2025
Monday 26 August 2024
Grave Expectations by Alice Bell
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Thursday 22 August 2024
Warner Brothers releases trailer for LORD OF THE RINGS: WAR OF THE ROHIRRM
BLAKE'S 7 to get Blu-Ray release with new model vfx
Blake's 7, the seminal dystopian British space opera series, is getting a re-release on Blu-Ray. The first season will launch on the format on 11 November this year.
Blake's 7, created by Terry Nation, ran for four seasons from 1978 to 1981, chalking up 52 episodes. The show, set roughly a thousand years in the future, saw an ideological revolutionary, engineer Roj Blake, framed for crimes he didn't commit by the despotic Terran Federation and sent to a remote penal colony. Blake escaped with the help of a group of hardened criminals, salvaging an advanced alien starship along the way. Blake wanted to use the ship, dubbed the Liberator, to strike back at the Federation and eventually help destroy it; his criminal comrades had other, more lucrative ideas for what to do with the vessel. The series became infamous for its bleakness, its high cast turnover and remarkable body count amongst the regular cast. The show was also noteworthy for its endlessly quotable dialogue, its dark sense of humour, and sometimes mind-bogglingly bad special effects.
This new release uses the impressive technology used previously on Doctor Who and Red Dwarf to dramatically improve the quality of the video-shot interior scenes, whilst exterior film footage has been rescanned in HD. There is also the option to replace all of the vfx with new material, including newly-recreated model shots, occasional CG sequences and new teleport effects. The release includes a documentary that was shot over a decade ago for the DVD re-release but had to be held back for copyright issues, as well as newly-shot interview footage with surviving crew and castmembers.
Blake's 7 was tremendously influential on J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 (JMS is an avowed Blake's 7 fan), due to its serialised storytelling. Echoes of the show can also be seen in the likes of Firefly (Joss Whedon was studying in the UK when Blake's 7 was airing), with its band of dysfunctional characters forced to work together by circumstance.
There has been several attempts over the years to reboot Blake's 7, with the UK's Sky One getting close over a decade ago, although their take was altogether more cliched (with Blake as a disgruntled ex-soldier driven to revenge by the murder of his wife) and less interesting, but the idea seems on the backburner for now.
Thursday 1 August 2024
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to star onstage in WAITING FOR GODOT
Only very tangentially genre-related, but this seems like an outstanding bit of casting. Bill & Ted co-stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are reuniting, this time onstage in a new production of Samuel Beckett's classic play Waiting for Godot. Reeves will play Estragon whilst Winter will play Vladimir.
The production will be directed by Jamie Lloyd and will hit Broadway in autumn 2025.
Reeves and Winter previously starred together in the three films of the Bill & Ted franchise: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). They reprised the roles in the animated series Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (1990-91).
NBC and Peacock drop BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot reboot plans
After several years in development hell, NBC and Peacock have abandoned their plans to reboot the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
Back in September 2019, NBC tapped Sam Esmail, the creative force behind Mr. Robot, to develop a fresh take on the Battlestar Galactica franchise for their Peacock streaming service. The franchise had been created by Glen A. Larson and aired a single, huge-budgeted season on ABC in 1978, opening to enormous ratings but shedding them by season's end to be cancelled. A spin-off show, Galactica 1980, aired a single, critically-derided half-season in 1980 before being likewise cancelled.
Ronald D. Moore and David Eick resurrected the show with a grittier reboot in 2003, informed by the War on Terror and the Iraq War. The show ran for four seasons and two spin-off TV movies, concluding in 2010. A further straight-to-DVD movie followed in 2013, and a spin-off show, Caprica, aired a single season in 2010-11. This reboot, produced by NBC for the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy), was vastly more acclaimed, winning a Peabody and a Hugo Award.
Despite Esmail's high profile, the project struggled to get off the ground, possibly because Esmail only wanted to write and produce, leaving day-to-day showrunning duties to another producer. Michael Lesslie initially took on the project, only to later depart. Derek Simonds came on board in January 2024 in what appears now to have been a last-ditch effort to save the project.
Confusingly, Lesslie and Esmail made competing statements, the former stating the new show would be a fresh reboot of the premise and Esmail saying the new show would exist within the 2003 show's continuity. In January 2022, Universal announced that the new show would exist alongside a fresh feature film take on the franchise, to be written by X-Men screenwriter Simon Kinberg.
Now NBC have confirmed they are terminating their involvement in the project. No reason was given, but it was likely the long gestation time and expense (albeit minor so far) spent on going nowhere, Esmail not having the same profile and clout that he did back in 2019 when the project was getting off the ground, and the considerably more hostile streaming climate, with Peacock not performing as well as it could have done.
Universal are now shopping the project to other potentially interested parties