Babylon 5 TV series creator J. Michael Straczynski has teamed up with Warner Bros. Animation for an animated movie
Produced by Warner Bros. Television, the sci-fi series Babylon 5 ran for a total of five seasons and 110 episodes, wrapping up in 1998. There were also six TV movies, a short-lived spin-off series called Crusade, tie-in novels and comic books… and series creator J. Michael Straczynski has been hoping to revive the show in some way for quite a while. In 2014, we heard he was planning to make a Babylon 5 feature film. In 2021, it was announced that he had set up a reboot series at The CW. Now Straczynski has taken to social media to reveal that a Babylon 5 animated movie is coming from Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment – and it’s already finished and in the can! He said the release date will be “very soon”.
Straczynski said the animated movie is “classic Babylon 5: raucous, heartfelt, nonstop, a ton of fun through time and space, and a love letter to the fans. I’m ridiculously excited about it because it feels the most B5-ish of anything we’ve done since the original show. Warners was terrific in giving me the freedom to write the story I wanted, and the animation is phenomenal. It’s fun, deep, emotional, classic B5.“
He added that if this animated movie does well, there will be more animated Babylon 5 movies, possibly on a regular basis. So he encouraged fans to get the hashtag #B5AnimatedMovie trending on Twitter to let Warner Bros. know they’re excited for the project.
According to Straczynski, the film’s title, release date, and more information will be announced next week.
Babylon 5 follows the human military staff and alien diplomats stationed on a space station, Babylon 5, built in the aftermath of several major inter-species wars as a neutral ground for galactic diplomacy and trade. Major plotlines included Babylon 5’s embroilment in a millennial cyclic conflict between ancient races, inter-race wars and their aftermaths, and intra-race intrigue and upheaval. The human characters, in particular, become pivotal to the resistance against Earth’s descent into totalitarianism.
Are you a fan of Babylon 5, and are you excited to hear there’s an animated movie on the way? Share your thoughts on this project by leaving a comment below.
In addition to creating Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski has also co-created Sense8 and created Jeremiah, worked on the scripts for Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, Ninja Assassin, Thor, Underworld: Awakening, and World War Z, and written for such TV shows as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, Captain Power, The Twilight Zone, The Real Ghostbusters; Murder, She Wrote, and Walker, Texas Ranger.
