It must be tough being Roland Emmerich. Your passion project about the Stonewall riots gets savaged by critics and then left to die on the vine when it finally hits theaters. Next year, your big comeback — a long-awaited sequel to Independence Day, the film that remains your greatest success — goes down like the Hindenburg, mustering a faint fraction of the original’s box-office might and getting outclassed by a cartoon about a lost fish. You need a win, and luckily, you’ve got a sure thing coming down the pike: A remake of your first major blockbuster, 1994’s sci-fi adventure Stargate.

But the hits keep coming for hapless Emmerich. Turns out we shouldn’t hold our breath for the Stargate reboot any time soon, as producer Dean Devlin recently expressed doubt that the project will be seen through to completion. In an interview with Empire, Devlin got frank about the future of Stargate:

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. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work independently. 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.

One might wonder where these concerns over doing right by the fans were back when Emmerich first announced his plans for the remake back in 2013. But that's the worst part about dropping a megaflop, as Emmerich did with Independence Day: Resurgence; it’s not just a failure, but it casts doubt on your ability to not screw up again in the future. Devlin added:

You’d have several studios 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.

It’s tough to re-bottle lightning after twenty years, and matching the tone-perfect casting of Kurt Russell and James Spader would be an unenviable task. So though this undoubtedly comes as a blow to the many fans of the film and its various TV spinoffs, perhaps it's for the best. Emmerich will find something else to do, probably.

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