Dean Parisot’s 1999 comedy Galaxy Quest is viewed with such affection as a love letter to sci-fi television, that Star Trek fans voted it as the seventh-best movie in the franchise back in 2013, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with the adventures of the Enterprise crew outside of the superficial similarities in concept and character.
Watching Galaxy Quest, though, the Trek influence is hardly obscured, with Tim Allen’s Jason Nesmith and Alan Rickman’s Alexander Dane clearly thinly-veiled interpretations of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, while the plot involves diehard fans, the convention circuit and the tropes of Star Trek: The Original Series itself when the actors who piloted the fictional NESA Protector find themselves drawn into a real intergalactic conflict.
The movie was a decent-sized hit at the box office after earning just over $90 million on a budget of $45 million, but over the last 20 years it’s become a bona fide cult classic. Galaxy Quest had shown such impressive longevity, in fact, that talks over a sequel finally gained some real traction, and a TV show was in the works before Alan Rickman’s death in 2016 put any plans on the back burner.
However, in a recent interview, Tim Allen revealed that he hasn’t completely given up hope just yet, even though the main driving force of the follow-up was set to be the growing divide between his and Rickman’s characters.
“It’s a fabulous script, but it had a hiccup because the wonderful Alan Rickman passed. So it all got very sad and dark because it was all about them. It was all about their story. It doesn’t mean they can’t reboot the idea, and the underlying story was hysterical and fun. I haven’t reached out to anybody in the last week, but we talk about it all 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. It could happen now or in five years and it doesn’t matter at all because when you travel at light speed, when you come back it can be like only 20 minutes, but 20 years have passed, right? That part is wonderful for the sci-fi freak in me. But right now it’s in a holding pattern.”
The project has been on hold for well over two years at this point, and it might not end up happening at all despite Allen’s comments. After all, there are a lot of Galaxy Quest fans who won’t be anywhere near as interested without Rickman, when his scene stealing performance was easily one of the movie’s highlights. Still, it’s nice to hear that the actor remains hopeful and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
