Stargate Is Leaving Streaming, Watch It Now Before It’s Gone
The 1994 sci-fi classic Stargate is leaving HBO Max.
Continuing the trend of movies only staying on streaming platforms for a short amount of time, Stargate, the 1994 Roland Emmerich sci-fi film that launched multiple TV series, will be leaving HBO Max just six short months after arriving on the platform. The movie, starring Kurt Russell and James Spader, arrived on the platform on November 1, 2022, and is set to leave on April 30, 2023. News of its removal from the platform comes shortly after the announcement that an “Ultimate Edition” of the film will soon be released on Blu-Ray.
In Stargate, James Spader plays Dr. Daniel Jackson, an Egyptologist who discovers ancient ruins that show how to unlock a wormhole-creating device called a “Stargate” that can connect worlds. It’s soon revealed that this Stargate had been discovered years ago. Jackson Air Force Colonel Jack O’Neil (played by Kurt Russell) and his team open the portal and travel to the desert planet Abydos, where the inhabitants are found to be humans who speak a variant of ancient Egyptian and worship a very real alien being known as Ra.
Stargate received middling reviews from critics, and it currently has a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The main critique was that the movie relied on special effects to disguise a relatively thin premise. Despite this, it did well at the box office, earning $196 million at the international box office against a $55 million budget.
Famously, high school teacher Omar Zuhdi launched a lawsuit against production company StudioCanal in 1995, alleging that Stargate plagiarized his script Egyptscape, written in 1984. The script, which was later turned into a book by Zuhdi, involves an Egyptologist becoming part of a government experiment that opens a door to an ancient civilization. Unlike Stargate, this civilization is not on another planet but exists in the past — making the book a time travel story rather than a space exploration story.
In 1996, a judge ruled that there was a “substantial similarity” between Egyptscape and Stargate, letting the lawsuit go to a jury trial. However, before the case came to trial, the StudioCanal settled with Zuhdi for $50,000 — a mere fraction of the $149 million that Zuhdi was asking for.
The main legacy of Stargate is not the film itself but the fact that it launched a science fiction franchise that has spanned television, comics, web series, video games, tabletop games, and even a Six Flags simulator ride.
Perhaps the most famous incarnation of the franchise is Stargate SG-1, a TV series starring Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks, and Amanda Tapping. The series, which lasted for 10 seasons, takes place a year after the film, with the characters playing a military team tasked with defending the Earth from extraterrestrial threats. The team makes alliances with other alien races as they take on hostile species such as the Goa’uld and the Ori.
Stargate SG-1 was enormously popular for a sci-fi TV show, growing in popularity through its eighth season, where it broke viewership records for the genre. However, Richard Dean Anderson left the show after Season 8, being replaced by Ben Browder. Soon after, the series began to decline in ratings.
The films Stargate: Continuum and Stargate: The Ark of Truth served as sequels to SG-1, starring the same cast members as the TV series. A spinoff series, Stargate Atlantis, launched while Stargate SG-1 was on the air, though it ended just two years after SG-1‘s final season. Stargate Universe came out after Atlantis ended, but it only lasted two seasons and ended on a semi-cliffhanger.
About a decade later, the single-season web miniseries Stargate Origins was released on the website, Stargate Command. The series serves as a prequel to the original Stargate, taking place in the late 1930s — shortly after the Stargate was discovered. The ten-minute episodes were eventually strung together into a single movie called Stargate Origins: Catherine.
While it’s been a few years since a Stargate series has been released, a new series is reportedly in the works at Amazon. This news came from series writer and producer Joseph Mallozzi, who posted a Twitter poll asking how long the first season should be before stating that Amazon is “definitely planning a new series.” So far, neither Amazon nor MGM Studios has confirmed this claim.
