There may be “good news” for Galaxy Quest fans when it comes to the beloved 1999 sci-fi comedy’s long-awaited sequel. Sigourney Weaver opened up to Collider Wednesday about how the tragic death of Alan Rickman in 2016 impacted the original sequel plans and teased that momentum is beginning to build again more than two decades after the original film’s release.
Whispers of the project possibly being revived as a TV show were circulating in 2016 until Rickman, who played Sir Alexander Dame in the original film, died at 69 after a battle with cancer. Weaver told Collider that while the original Galaxy Quest script had “a lot of the wittiest scenes” cut by DreamWorks in order to release it at Christmas as a children’s movie, the writers “decided not to let [DreamWorks] have the second one” in order to keep in all the original humor. “However, it was about four years ago, [writer Bob Gordon] and [producer] Mark Johnson and the whole group, started to develop a series,” she continued. “We lost the wonderful Alan [Rickman] unexpectedly, so that was put in mothballs, but I think they are finally now reviving it.”
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“It will be the story of the old ancient Galaxy Questers being brought into this series with another young cast,” she continued. While she hasn’t read the story yet, Weaver said it’s her belief that everyone in the original Galaxy Quest would “love to participate” because it was “such a wonderful experience for us.” After Rickman’s passing, Weaver did say she wondered how they would ever cast someone to play his part, but noted she thought “they have a very good idea of who to do it.”
“He’s irreplaceable, eternally,” the Alien actress added of Rickman, who would go on to play the iconic role of Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. “I think there may be good news on that front, but I haven’t heard about it in these six months, so when it’s gonna happen, I’m not sure.”
Tim Allen, who played Jason Nesmith in the original film, echoed a similar sequence of events while talking with Entertainment Weekly in January. “I haven’t reached out to anybody in the last week, but we talk about it all the time,” he said at the time. “There is constantly a little flicker of a butane torch that we could reboot it with. Without giving too much away, a member of Alan’s Galaxy Quest family could step in and the idea would still work.”
