Bruce Boxleitner Reveals Babylon 5 Reboot Is In Trouble
Bruce Boxleitner hasn't heard anything from producers about a Babylon 5 reboot.
While both Star Trek and Star Wars are really dominating television at the moment, many sci-fi fans are clamoring for the reboot of Babylon 5, which has been a topic of much online discussion for two years. And it seems like both series creator J. Michael Straczynski and Captain John Sheridan actor Bruce Boxleitner are on board to reboot the venerable series, but there has not been anything officially announced. Now, it looks like the show might never make it off the ground: Bruce Boxleitner revealed to Comicbook.com that the Babylon 5 reboot was in trouble, saying, “I haven’t heard a thing.”
Of course, Bruce Boxleitner’s words about the possible Babylon 5 reboot carry special weight because he played Sheridan for 88 episodes, three TV movies, and in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (which was the first real attempt to bring the show back, but it never continued into the ongoing anthology series that Straczynski had dreamt of). He is basically the face of the franchise, just as he is still the face of Tron (both literally and figuratively). In fact, he dropped this bad news about the reboot at Disney’s All the Disney Thrills event, where he was there to help promote the new attraction Tron: Lightcycle / RUN.
Bruce Boxleitner didn’t say much about the Babylon 5 reboot because, quite frankly, there isn’t much for him to say. He did briefly speculate that “big corporate shakeups going on at Warner Brothers and CW” would likely decide the fate of the troubled reboot before admitting that “I don’t know how it’s played out.” In other words, even though Boxleitner is theoretically in a better position to receive updates about any potential reboot, it looks like he doesn’t know much more about whether it will happen than the average fan.
While we wish that Bruce Boxleitner had better news (or perhaps just more definitive news) about the Babylon 5 reboot, it’s not all bad news for fans of this classic science fiction series. The series recently got remastered before it was released on HBO Max, and Straczynski recently tweeted that now that the HBO license has expired, the show will be heading to both Roku and Tubi. That means fans who want to engage in nostalgia for this genre-defining 90’s series will be able to watch it in the best possible quality later this year, and they’ll watch it for free without having to subscribe to HBO Max (a service that notably keeps cutting content while expecting you to pay the same price each month).
Hope springs eternal that, even if Bruce Boxleitner doesn’t know anything about it, the Babylon 5 reboot plans may be proceeding behind closed doors, especially after J. Michael Straczynski rallied fans last year to demonstrate how much demand there is for this series. And considering the current sci-fi renaissance led by both Star Trek and Star Wars, this may be the perfect time to bring back an awesome universe that already has an entire galaxy of fans. Until then, we’ll be counting down the days until we can binge the remastered original series on Tubi.
