The Sci-Fi Spinoff That Ruined Our Chances at Selling the Franchise to Compete with Star Wars
Posted by Joshua Tyler | Published
New space science fiction shows that it rarely catches fire instantly. Star Trek it was tragically canceled after three seasons due to low ratings, but rose from the ashes in reruns. Firefly was canceled after a few episodes, but the movie turned out to be so good that it ended up almost at the top of our list of the best movies of all time.
But one space series did the impossible. It captured the cultural zeitgeist instantly. In the now-forgotten era of binge-watching via Netflix DVDs mailed to the office, it became something of a concern for sci-fi fans and the like.
That was supposed to be the launching pad for a next-generation sci-fi franchise that would rival Star Wars. Instead, it spawned a spinoff series so disastrous that everything it built up evaporated into thin air, leaving nothing but the sweat of shirtless athletes.
This Why Caprica Failed.
Battlestar Galactica Finishes On Top
When it reconsiders Battlestar Galactica finished in March 2009, it had two things the franchise needed: audience fervor and serious credibility. During the program, episodes of the show were playing in theaters to a packed audience. It was a topic of conversation about watercolor and even got into people who weren’t into science fiction.
The finale averaged 2.2M viewers in the US, and the finale peaked at ~2.4M, the show’s best number in years. Those may not sound like big numbers, but they were huge for a show that aired on SyFy, an overlooked basic cable channel.
When Battlestar Galactica came on DVD, it became very popular as people bought box sets and binged on the show in one go in the pre-broadcast era. A battle star expanded the concept of indulgence, setting the stage for the future of broadcasting to come.
I BSG the universe was perfectly poised to grow into a mega-media franchise that spans generations. Star Trek turned into a mega-franchise after three seasons were canceled, and this was it Battlestar Galactica riding the wave of success that should have made it so much easier to move on to the next level.
Instead, following came the movements that stopped the attention and trained the fans to stop entering. Just a few years after its success, Battlestar Galactica became a dead franchise, an opportunity missed by SyFy’s parent company, NBCUniversal.
How NBCUniversal Wasted Battlestar Galactica’s Chances for Its Next Show
NBCU/Syfy produced companion pieces: The razor (2007) in runtime and DVD only The program (2009) after that, but the crux of “what’s next” came as Caprica in 2010.
Ronald D. Moore, the mastermind behind Battlestar Galactica, served as one of the creators on Caprica. He shares the title with a man named Remi Aubuchon, who once worked with Moore in the BSG writers’ room. By all accounts, it was Remi, not Moore, who was the real creator of the show. Which may, at least in part, explain why it’s so different.
Set over fifty years before the events of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica it is about how human bureaucracy accidentally creates a society that will lead to its destruction. Caprica centers on two families, the Greystones and the Adamas, as advanced technology collides with grief, religion, and arrogance. It results in the birth of the Cylons. The idea was to have it happen slowly, very slowly, during the show.
Actually, Caprica it is played like a soap opera, with few sci-fi elements on screen. The plan was ambitious but also completely unique.
Caprica it was a prequel about a corporate intrigue set in a universe where the audience expected a nonsensical space fight. It gave fans something with the Battlestar Galactica name attached to it that was completely unlike the franchise they loved. Think if, after Star Trek was canceled in the 60s, CBS had decided to follow it up with Star Trek a set of police procedures in the World, and you will begin to understand what a terrible mistake Caprica it was.
Caprica it needs patient planning and a clear runway to overcome the obstacle of its foundation. It didn’t get it either. Critics tried to give it a chance, but despite praising its brilliance, they ended up agreeing that it was unreasonably slow, talkative, and wildly unbalanced. And, there really is no such thing as a world full of discord Battlestar Galactica.
Ratings slipped from a midseason high of 1.6 M to less than 900,000 viewers after the hiatus; Syfy then canceled the show and pulled the remaining episodes from its schedule, burning them after a few months. Whatever audience was willing to follow learned the wrong lesson: don’t invest.
After Caprica, NBCUniversal Stopped Caring
It was such an immediate and overwhelming failure that whatever faith there was in BSG evaporated. Nevertheless, a last ditch effort to salvage things was thrown together.
After Capricaseries Blood and Chrome it was announced, and it felt like the crowd pleaser they should have been doing in the first place. It was going to be about young Adam in the context of the Cylon War.
Unfortunately, NBCUniversal had already given up BSG. Instead of a quick series order and huge investment, the project arrived as a 10-part web series on Machinima in late 2012 and more recently as a TV movie in early 2013.
Battlestar Galactica needs a grand Star Trek: The Motion Picture– blockbuster movie style to push it to the next level. NBCUniversal gave it a low-budget web series. Producer David Eick is set to go public Blood and Chrome as “always meant to be” online, but that didn’t make it any better; it was just insulting.
Ronald Moore Killed His Own Creation
The truth is, the biggest fault lies at the feet of Ronald D. Moore. Before you come at me with your pitchforks, let me say that I love Ron Moore. And I loved him a long time ago A battle star.
Moore was a big part of the creative force behind the best parts of Star Trek: Deep Space Nineand his work is simply amazing. But when he finished Battlestar Galacticahe gave up the franchise he was born to be.
He admitted that he was burned. Space objects have been burned. He spent a decade working on Star Trek, then created his own space show, and didn’t want to do space sci-fi anymore.
The thing is, that’s what he’s good at, and that’s where his success has always been. Nothing he’s done since has come close to reaching the level of quality achieved in Star Trek either BSG. He’s done a lot since then, none of it in space.
Ron Moore had the opportunity to enter a generation, and when BSG finished, he decided not to do anything about it. The result was a show no one wanted Capricafollowed by the evaporation of everything he worked so hard to create.
He could have been the next Gene Roddenberry, but instead, he has spent his time since doing things like time travel romances, without following any real tradition.
SyFy Is Being Turned Into The Wrestling Channel
While all this is happening, the channel is launched Battlestar Galactica it was resetting itself. The Sci Fi channel was rebranded as Syfy in 2009 and leaned more towards a broad appeal of reality/genre adherence.
Turning your fantasy channel into a fighting channel has always been weird. It reduced the idea of ​​”space opera lives here,” right when Galactica fans needed a reliable home for their successors. Commercial coverage and industry commentary at the time called for a change, and cancellations combined with quality sci-fi writing.
NBCUniversal Drops Ron Moore’s Sci-Fi Universe
Universal finally started announcing the Battlestar Galactica feature films. That sounds good, but it wasn’t. They were all reboots and not continuations of the show. There was one with Bryan Singer attached in 2011, then Francis Lawrence in 2016, then Simon Kinberg in 2020. None of them actually happened.
What happened was that NBCUniversal made it clear to fans that the sci-fi mansion Ron Moore spent 10 years building was trashed, and that if BSG were to return, they would be starting over. Universal did the impossible, produced a hit sci-fi show. And then they decided to wipe it out and start over rather than continue to grow from that foundation.
Imagine if, instead of giving William Shatner’s Captain Kirk the movie, they would have remade him and remade all the same episodes again. Or instead of launching a new show set in the same place, in the manner of The Next Generation, Star Trek wiped the slate clean, created a new sci-fi universe, and slapped an old name on it.
Unfortunately, that is now standard practice in Hollywood. The fast trend is above all the reason behind BSG. That thought is why there has never been another enduring sci-fi franchise like Star Trek or Star Wars, and why there never will be. Battlestar Galactica was ready to take that journey, but no one at Universal had the guts to invest real money.
