Universal’s Battlestar Galactic Film Lands Simon Kinberg to Write/Produce

Universal’s Battlestar Galactic film lands Simon Kinberg to write/produce

It’s been two years since word last broke that Jay Basu (The Girl in the Spider’s Web) had been tapped to pen a new draft for Universal Pictures’ Battlestar Galactica film adaptation and now it looks as though the studio is changing gears again as Simon Kinberg (Dark Phoenix) has signed on to write and produce the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

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“Battlestar Galactica is one of the holy grails in science fiction,  and I couldn’t be more excited about bringing something new to the franchise, while honoring what’s made it so iconic and enduring,” Kinberg said in a statement. “I’m so grateful that Dylan and my partners at Universal have trusted me with this incredible universe.”

After spending years as the creative head of Fox’s X-Men film franchise, Kinberg has found a new franchise to work with in Battlestar and is reportedly going to start from scratch in developing the story of humans on distant planets at war with a race of intelligent machines hellbent on wiping them out. Kinberg will produce the project alongside Dylan Clark, who has been attached to the project for nearly five years now, with other previous talent attached to the project having included screenwriter Lisa Joy (Westworld) and directors Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games) and Bryan Singer (X-Men: Apocalypse).

The sci-fi franchise began with the 1978 television series, which chronicled the adventures of space faring vessel centuries in the future. At the end of a millenia-long conflict with a robotic race known as the Cylons, the last surviving warship, the Galactica, leads a convoy of hundreds of human vessels in search of a mythic planet called Earth.

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The first Battlestar Galactica series was followed by a brief sequel/spinoff series, Galactica: 1980, two years later. The franchise is arguably best known today, however, as a rebooted television version that premiered in 2004. That series, created by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, was followed by a short lived prequel series, Caprica, in 2010 and a webseries, Blood & Chrome, in 2012. It is believed that the new Battlestar Galactica movie, which is being produced by Bluegrass Films, will again reboot the franchise.

(Photo Credit: Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic)