'Babylon 5' Will Soon Be Back With An Animated Movie

After being teased a week earlier, the name of the place is once again Babylon 5

It’s the dawn of the third age of humanity. Or maybe fourth? After 25 years, Babylon 5 is finally back, this time as an animated movie. Of course, it comes from original creator J. Michael Straczynski.

The news came a week after Straczynski unveiled a new series logo variant and teased we’d be finding out more in a week, and now we know what. It’s from Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, so while it’s not a theatrical film like The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (for a franchise that hadn’t been animated outside of Lego in 50 years), it’s probably going to be a direct-to-video film, which is great as a branch of the company that manages to persist in the age of David Zaslav’s leadership. While largely used for DC, Scooby-Doo, and Tom and Jerry titles in the years since Babylon 5 went off the air, that includes two animated movies for the also-live action 1966 Batman series starring Adam West and Burt Ward released in 2016 and 2017.

Straczynski promises that the movie is “classic B5”, calling it raucous, heartfelt, and a ton of fun through time and space, as well as a love letter to the fans. He also promises movie title, release date and other details coming one week from today, but will be directly from Warner Bros. itself. Why so much? Because the movie is “already finished and in the can…100% real, happening, and coming out very soon.” He touts the creative freedom he was given, saying “it feels the most B5-ish of anything we've done since the original show. Warners was terrific…and the animation is phenomenal”.

The original Babylon 5 was produced by Warner Bros. Television. The series ran on the Primetime Entertainment Network (PTEN) for four seasons before the network collapsed, so the show was rescued by TNT for the fifth, each running 22 episodes for 110 total. There were also seven TV movies, including the 1993 pilot film, and a spinoff series Crusade. B5 is considered one of the best science fiction series ever made by many critics and won countless awards throughout its run, including two Hugo Awards and a Saturn Award. It took place on a five-mile-long space station in neutral space, called Babylon 5, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war with the Minbari. The cast for the series included Michael O’Hare, Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Andreas Katsulas, Mira Furlan, Bill Mumy and Richard Briggs.

A live action reboot was announced to be in development for The CW in 2021, the same year the series arrived remastered on HBO Max. However, the formation of Warner Bros. Discovery and the sale of the network to Nexstar, who has very different programming priorities, has made pickup seem unlikely. However, no decision one way or the other has been made. There’s also whatever effects the current Writers Guild of America strike may have on it.

Straczynski also co-created Netflix’s Sense8 with the Wachowskis and was showrunner. He’s also written films such as Changeling, Ninja Assassin, and the stories for the first Thor film, and World War Z. He’s also a comic book writer, with several Marvel and DC titles to his name. He stated that if the movie does well, there will be more animated movies, even suggesting a Scooby-like “regular basis”. Babylon 5 was one of the series that left HBO Max in recent months, and is now streaming on Tubi, though I couldn’t find The Gathering.

Sources: Variety, Twitter (1, 2, 3)