Babylon 5 Creator: Reboot Pilot Still 'Active' at CW, for 2023 Consideration

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has offered an update on his prospective reboot for The CW, which is not among the pilots picked up by the network this development season.

The original Babylon 5 debuted in 1993 and presented a future-history story covering the years 2257-2262, with each year corresponding to one season. Straczynski won over a dozen awards for his work on the series, including two Hugo Awards, a Saturn Award and the Ray Bradbury Award.

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The “from-the-ground-up reboot” reboot he developed follows John Sheridan, an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, who is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space. Sheridan’s arrival triggers “a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined,” when an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us.

Though said reboot did not get a pilot order this winter, all hope is not lost.

As reported by The Mary Sue, Straczynski shared on his Patreon that while “99.999% of the time, that’s the end of the road for the project,” CW CEO Mark Pedowitz believes in the project enough to “roll” it to next development season.

“I should mention that Mark is a great guy and a long-time fan of B5. He worked for Warners when the show was first airing,” Straczynski wrote. “Calling the [reboot] pilot ‘a damned fine script,’ he said he was taking the highly unusual step of rolling the project and the pilot script into next year, keeping B5 in active development while the dust settles on the [prospective] sale of the CW.”

“Here’s the bottom line: Yesterday, Babylon 5 was in active development at the CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2022. Today, Babylon 5 is in active development at the CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2023,” he added. “That is the only difference.”

Straczynski — who most recently created, wrote and show-ran (with the Wachowskis) Netflix’s Sense8 — will write and executive-produce (through his Studio JMS) the new Babylon 5, which is a Warner Bros. Television project.

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