Stargate Revival: Amazon Taps WandaVision’s Jac Schaeffer

The Stargate is dialing again. Four months after Amazon MGM Studios pulled the plug on a revival that had already completed a 20-week writers’ room, the studio has found someone new to walk through the gate — and it’s the person who made WandaVision.

Variety broke the news on Friday that Jac Schaeffer, the creator and showrunner behind WandaVision and its spinoff Agatha All Along, is developing a new Stargate television series for Amazon MGM Studios. Deadline confirmed the report the same afternoon. The project sits under the overall deal Schaeffer signed with Amazon MGM after her time at Marvel Studios and 20th Television came to an end.

Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell of Safehouse Pictures will executive produce alongside Schaeffer. Harold’s producing credits include Obi-Wan Kenobi and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, so this isn’t a team being handed a sci-fi franchise cold. Neither Amazon nor Schaeffer would comment, which is standard for deals that are still being papered.

What Amazon Is Actually Building

Details are thin by design. Variety reported that a writers’ room was “expected to open in the near future”; Deadline, working the same story, said a room has already opened in New York. Either way, the work is early. There’s no title, no cast, no episode count, no release window, and no confirmation of whether this is a reboot, a sequel, or a fresh corner of the same universe.

The original 1994 Stargate film — directed by Roland Emmerich and co-written with Dean Devlin — grossed about $196.5 million worldwide and turned a pulpy idea about an alien wormhole gate into one of MGM’s most durable properties. That movie spawned Stargate SG-1, which ran for 10 seasons and 214 episodes between 1997 and 2007, then Stargate Atlantis for five seasons, then Stargate Universe, which ended in 2011 on a cliffhanger that still stings.

The franchise has been quiet since Universe signed off. Two direct-to-DVD films landed in 2008, and a 2018 web series, Stargate Origins, came and went without much noise. When Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion in 2022, Stargate was one of the first titles named for film or TV adaptation. Four years later, the studio is still trying.

The Ghost of the Gero Series

You can’t write about this news without writing about the show that died to make room for it.

In November 2025, Prime Video gave a series order to a new Stargate from Martin Gero — a franchise veteran who wrote for SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe. Brad Wright and Joseph Mallozzi, two of the architects of the television era, came aboard as consulting producers. The writers’ room ran nearly 20 weeks. The production moved into pre-production in the United Kingdom.

Then, in June 2026, Variety reported that Amazon MGM had scrapped it. The stated concern, according to the trades, was that the series “would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase.” Mallozzi confirmed the cancellation on his blog, writing that Gero had spent two years building “a show that offered a fresh jumping-on point for new viewers while deeply respecting existing canon.” Fans launched a campaign to save it. Cast members spoke up. None of it mattered.

Reporting since has pointed to a leadership shift rather than a creative verdict. The executives who championed Gero’s project had both departed the studio, and the incoming regime decided his vision no longer fit. The timing was late enough that the show couldn’t be retooled — only killed.

Why Jac Schaeffer Makes Sense — and Why Fans Aren’t Sold

On paper, Schaeffer is exactly the hire a studio makes when it wants a franchise to feel like it belongs to the present tense. WandaVision was the first Marvel Studios series to hit Disney+ and pulled 23 Primetime Emmy nominations while doing something genuinely strange: using sitcom history as a horror device. Agatha All Along extended that trick into a witchy road-trip musical. Before Marvel, she wrote the Anne Hathaway–Rebel Wilson comedy The Hustle and Disney’s Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

That’s a track record of taking inherited IP and bending it into something with a voice. It’s also the reason a chunk of the Stargate fandom is furious. The comments under Variety’s story are a wall of people who wanted Gero’s version and don’t believe a Marvel-trained showrunner will understand what makes a military sci-fi procedural work. That isn’t a fair judgment of Schaeffer’s abilities — it’s a fair judgment of how the decision was made. Amazon killed a show the fans had been promised, then replaced it four months later with someone whose take nobody has seen.

Worth noting: Gero is still under an overall deal at Amazon MGM. The door isn’t sealed.

What Stargate Still Means in 2026

Here’s the part the discourse keeps skipping. Stargate isn’t a dormant brand — it’s an unusually well-preserved one. Three live-action series spanning 17 seasons and more than 350 episodes sit behind it, plus a fanbase that has kept the mythology alive through conventions, novels, comics, and rewatch culture for well over a decade.

What it doesn’t have is a recent hit. The last live-action episode aired before For All Mankind had even premiered. Since then, streaming has rewritten what a sci-fi series looks like. The Expanse proved you could do hard-SF politics on cable and then on Prime Video. Star Trek rebuilt itself as a franchise of interconnected streaming shows. Fallout showed that a beloved genre property can find a mass audience if the adaptation is confident enough to stand on its own.

Stargate’s problem has never been the premise. A gate that dials other worlds is one of the cleanest hooks in science fiction — episodic when you want it, serialized when you need it, cheap enough to shoot in a forest, and elastic enough to absorb gods, aliens, and time loops. The problem is that two attempts in two years have now been greenlit and then shelved or restarted without a single frame of footage reaching the public.

What Happens Next

Practically: nothing you can watch. A writers’ room is the very first step, and Stargate is a show that needs casting, sets, and visual effects before it can exist. If Amazon moves fast, a 2028 premiere is optimistic. If it moves the way it did with Gero’s version, there’s no guarantee this one survives either.

The interesting question is tonal. WandaVision worked because Schaeffer treats genre as a delivery system for grief. Stargate, at its best, is about something adjacent: a team of people who keep walking into unknown rooms because someone has to. If she brings the character-first instinct and leaves the meta-tricks at home, this could be the version that finally sticks. If it comes out looking like a Marvel show wearing a military jacket, the fandom will say so loudly — and Amazon will have burned its third attempt at the franchise in four years.

The gate is open. We just don’t know what’s on the other side yet.

Sources: Variety, Deadline, Dark Horizons, Wikipedia.

What do you want from a new Stargate — a clean reboot, or a continuation of the SG-1 timeline? Sound off in the comments.