Joe Flanigan has stayed quiet through six weeks of #SaveStargate campaigning. That changed this week, when the actor who played Lt. Colonel John Sheppard on Stargate Atlantis appeared in a video message shared by the fan campaign, thanking supporters and delivering a direct line to Amazon MGM Studios: “People do change their mind.” Flanigan is one of the few people connected to the franchise who saw inside the Martin Gero-led revival Amazon scrapped roughly 20 weeks into preproduction, and his video is the campaign’s first message from an actor who had stayed out of it entirely until now.
The timing lines up with the campaign’s most significant numbers yet. The “Save Stargate with Martin Gero” petition has crossed 110,000 verified signatures, closing in on 115,000 after blowing past the 100,000 mark in June. The campaign held its first stop outside the United States on July 18, a rally across from the London Eye, following a banner plane over Amazon MGM’s Culver City lot in June and a billboard takeover in New York’s Times Square. A coordinated “#SaveStargate Day” is planned for July 25, timed to San Diego Comic-Con weekend, with organizers planning a campaign presence at the convention itself. Amazon MGM has not issued a public statement addressing the petition, the demonstrations, or the growing list of cast members backing the campaign since the cancellation broke in early June.
That cast list has grown steadily. Michael Shanks, who played Daniel Jackson across SG-1’s original run, was the first to publicly rally fans in June. Robert Patrick, Rachel Luttrell, Christopher Judge, David Hewlett, and Simone Bailly followed, spanning SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe. Hewlett and Luttrell signed the campaign’s banner in person at Shore Leave 46 earlier this month, posing for photos with fans at the convention. According to Deadline’s reporting, the cancellation traces back to Blair Fetter, Amazon’s Head of Worldbuilding & Genre Series, who joined the studio in February, three months after his own boss, Peter Friedlander, had greenlit the series in one of his first acts after arriving from Netflix.
The campaign has also picked up coverage well beyond genre outlets. Variety reported the original cancellation on June 2, citing concern the show “would not have broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase.” CBR covered the petition’s climb past 100,000 signatures. SciFiPulse.Net ran an analysis arguing the campaign had “transformed fan frustration into organised action, proving that the franchise’s audience is far from dormant.” The campaign’s own site points to a data point worth noting on its own: French broadcaster M6 ran a Stargate SG-1 promo on M6+ during the 2026 World Cup, one of the largest mainstream television audiences available, and SG-1 hit number seven on France’s streaming charts the exact week the cancellation news broke, months after Netflix re-licensed all ten seasons for the US, UK, Germany, and Latin America in February.
Organizers have kept the campaign deliberately positive rather than combative, framing it as a business case rather than a grievance: respect the source material, listen to the built-in fanbase, and use that as a foundation to reach new viewers. The Expanse’s revival after Syfy’s cancellation, driven by a similar fan push that convinced Amazon to pick it up for three more seasons, remains the reference point organizers keep returning to.
Amazon greenlit this Stargate revival once, with Gero, original film creators Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, and franchise veterans Brad Wright and Joseph Mallozzi all attached. Six weeks of sustained pressure, a six-figure petition, and now the show’s own actors adding their names in person haven’t produced so much as an acknowledgment from the studio. How much organized, verifiable demand does a franchise’s own fanbase have to produce before a studio owes them a response?
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I missed this, Col Shepherd throwing in is 👍
I don't trust Amazon to bring this back without f'king it up, a la ST Academy. As was pointed out in the movie Pet Semetary, sometimes, dead is best.