There is a lot to discuss in the MGM/Amazon world, with all the internal shake-ups since our last update. Marketing specialist and Hollywood industry veteran Jenny Stiven returns with GateWorld’s Darren Sumner to discuss the latest news and chart the most likely road map for Stargate going forward. If you have questions, tune in LIVE to ask them. You won’t want to miss this.

Share This Video ► https://youtu.be/bbPKtBI4H2o

Visit DialtheGate ► http://www.dialthegate.com
on Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/dialthegate
on Instagram ► https://instagram.com/dialthegateshow
on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/dial_the_gate
Visit Wormhole X-Tremists ► https://www.youtube.com/WormholeXTremists

Star Trek III Commentary ► https://anchor.fm/treknological/episodes/MISSION-036—Co-Captains-Commentary—Star-Trek-III-The-Search-for-Spock-w-Special-Guest-David-Read-of-Dial-The-Gate-e1rhb2e/a-a8g6puf

SUBSCRIBE!
https://youtube.com/dialthegate/

Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
0:22 – Opening Credits
0:50 – Welcome and Episode Outline
2:30 – Welcoming Jenny and Darren
3:15 – The Amazon/MGM Family Tree
3:48 – The Reality of MGM Acquisition
5:27 – Amazon Has Its Own Restructuring In Progress
5:55 – Let’s Bring Everyone Up To Speed
7:46 – Will Existing Stargate Content Be Available Internationally?
8:36 – The US Is Behind on Streaming
10:40 – Prime Video
11:26 – The Importance of Stargate’s International Availability
15:04 – International Money is Where It’s At
17:00 – What’s Happening: Just the Facts
20:03 – The Departure of Mark Burnett — “Agent of Chaos” ?
23:18 – MGM+
26:50 – Where Stargate Will Likely Go
28:19 – Brad’s Latest Stargate Script
32:18 – Amazon Wants Stargate to be Massive
39:37 – Fast-Tracking Stargate?
42:35 – MGM’s Priority is to Make Money
47:47 – A-B Testing with MGM Properties
50:55 – Amazon Has Its Own Bundling
58:20 – The Rumors are a Big Unknown
1:01:02 – Scripted Development Pitch Rumor
1:06:05 – How Can You Trust Streaming Numbers?
1:08:58 – It’s a Wild West Frontier
1:15:22 – A Bible, a Lookbook and a Pitch
1:21:13 – Don’t Give Me Something Without Putting Money Into It
1:23:37 – Astrokings
1:30:39 – Licensing and Merchandising
1:35:57 – Unverified and Anonymous Sources
1:44:33 – Rumor or Real?
1:50:34 – Context on Social Media
1:53:44 – Will Jenny Be Involved in the Next Series?
1:58:52 – Where Are We Getting New Audiences From?
2:06:41 – Don’t Shut Off Opportunities
2:08:37 – Brad’s Tweets Are Cathartic
2:13:10 – Would Amazon or MGM Make a Stargate Development Announcement?
2:17:10 – What’s Everyone Watching?
2:19:05 – The Orville Season Three
2:21:36 – A Great Star Wars Podcast
2:24:35 – Wrapping up with Jenny and Darren
2:24:55 – Post-Discussion Housekeeping
2:25:12 – Questiosn for David
2:27:39 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
#TurtleTimeline

TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Hello, everyone. My name is David Read and I am the host of Dial the Gate Episode 155. This is our State of the Gate. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you are live, you can submit questions to our team, who are in the chat right now, waiting to take your questions for Jenny Stiven, our industry veteran and Hollywood marketing guru, who’s gonna give us the lowdown and the latest on what’s been going on with MGM. If you are new to the channel and would like to see more content like this, please feel free to hit that Like button. I would prefer it if you do. It helps the show get a little bit more exposure and popularity and will help YouTube grow the audience. Please also consider sharing the video with a Stargate friend if you find the information insightful. If you wanna get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. Clips from this live streaming will be released over the course of the next few days on the Dial the Gate’s YouTube channel, possibly GateWorld as well, depending on the information that comes out. This is a live show. Jenny and Darren are gonna be with us. Again, the moderators are standing by if you have questions about MGM or about the Stargate franchise and its future. The moderators will be getting those questions over to me and we will be seeing where things go. Without further ado, Jenny Stiven of Clio Consulting, hello.

Jenny Stiven:
Hi. How are you guys doing?

David Read:
A little sick, but good.

Jenny Stiven:
I know. I’m so sorry.

David Read:
Darren Sumner of GateWorld.

Darren Sumner:
Hey, Dial the Gate.

David Read:
Welcome back.

Darren Sumner:
We’re glad to be back.

David Read:
Happy to have you both.

Darren Sumner:
I’ve been getting people pestering me with all the MGM news this year. “When are we gonna hear from Jenny again and when are we gonna do another State of the Gate?” Perfect timing. There’s so much to cover.

David Read:
I’m very thankful to have you both. So, Jenny, please.

Jenny Stiven:
I think if we had done this earlier, we would have missed all of this news that came through in the past two weeks. One of the first things I’m gonna do that will make you guys laugh that know me is that I tried to make the family tree of MGM and Amazon. If you can see right here, it makes absolutely no sense unless you start breaking it down. So, let’s break it down for everybody.

Darren Sumner:
It’s bigger than it was last time, I’ll say that.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s true. At least last time we had MGM in its own silo and Amazon in its own silo. Now all of those lines are mixed. I wanna start by saying this is pretty typical, and everybody, Darren, SciTrek, everybody’s talked about this online. David, we’ve talked about it ad nauseam every time we’ve gotten together. When a major studio is acquired, there is 10 months to 3 years that it takes for that acquisition to assess the people that are in that acquisition, how do they fit, where are redundancies, and sometimes they’re surprised. They may have had some preconceived notions of how they wanted that to weave together and that is what happened here. There were some preconceived notions, those didn’t work out. Some of the early exits, like Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, they knew that they weren’t gonna fit because they knew that those positions existed already at Amazon Creative Studios. It’s a little earlier than I thought it would happen; 10 months is a little early. But having said that, there was a lot of time during which the SEC was assessing the deal and that’s when Amazon and MGM were having a lot of meetings. So, this is normal and if you wanna compare it, for instance, to the Fox acquisition, which is the one I have the most personal experience with, this is exactly the same type of thing that happened. What we’re looking at right now is Amazon and its heads, assessed with MGM, who made the most sense, and especially when they’re looking at what is the goal for Amazon Studios, for Creative Studios, with MGM’s content. What’s the goal with all of the different divisions that MGM has, like Orion and Annapurna and a bazillion different divisions and how that was gonna work. The best way I can break this down is that Amazon had its own restructuring happening at the same time, not to make it more confusing.

David Read:
As a result of MGM coming in?

Jenny Stiven:
No.

David Read:
This was gonna happen anyway.

Jenny Stiven:
They had their own internal restructuring of how to work the company right after COVID 2020 and it took a while for that restructuring to filter out who fit, who didn’t, who wanted to move on. Then there were some natural movers on, like Jen Salke took over for a brilliant woman that exited. She wanted to go on and do her own thing. Let’s break some of that down.

Darren Sumner:
Before we get too deep into the weeds of the players and the positions, I imagine there might be some new people in the audience who are vaguely aware that Amazon has purchased MGM. But from the Stargate perspective, the sort of short recap of what we’re doing today is the deal was announced in May of 2021 and it closed in March of 2022. As Stargate fans, we’ve then been waiting for some news. Is Amazon gonna pull the trigger that MGM had hesitated on for some new Stargate project? We knew that Brad had written a script a couple of years ago and that that was basically a victim of COVID. You had said, I remember very vividly in one of our previous conversations, you had said, “Maybe it’s possible that Amazon comes in and sees Stargate here as this low-hanging fruit.” It’s a script that’s ready to go from one of the guys who co-created the entire franchise. They could pull the trigger quickly and clearly, they didn’t. Now we’re watching from the outside. We’re watching the business development and the executives moving their chairs around with the hope and the anticipation. The whole reason Amazon bought MGM is to make use of their library and that includes Stargate. In addition to putting all the shows on Prime Video, which they’ve done since we talked last, at least in the United States.

Jenny Stiven:
Which was a big question mark that we weren’t sure because of distribution.

Darren Sumner:
That was one of the things we talked about last time. I’d love to hear if you think that’s gonna eventually be international on Prime Video.

Jenny Stiven:
It will.

Darren Sumner:
But we’re also looking ahead to some sort of new Stargate project, whether that’s Brad’s or not. Is that a fair roadmap of where we’ve come from?

Jenny Stiven:
No, that’s a perfect roadmap.

Darren Sumner:
Up to now.

Jenny Stiven:
I love when you do that. That’s brilliant. To answer the question of where the existing Stargate content is: yes, it will be international. The problem, as we’ve talked about before, is that there were existing international distribution contracts that had been signed, sealed, and delivered as of 2020 prior to the sale, even early 2021. So, some of those need to finish out. Some of them can be transferred. If you think about it in old-school syndication, and we used to watch Stargate. I found it on Showtime, but then I was able to rewatch it on syndication. Syndication is when your original broadcaster, or in this case a streamer, resells its content to other distributors around the world or internally in the US. One of the reasons that still happens is, let’s be honest, streaming and internet penetration globally is still only between 68, 74% of the “TV-watching public.”

Darren Sumner:
Is that all?

Jenny Stiven:
Yeah. eMarketer says it’s less. Global World Index says it’s more. So, it depends on what you’re qualifying as: are they receiving it on their cell phone, are they receiving it on a desktop or their TV? So, that’s what changes. It can be anywhere from 52 to 74%. In the US, it’s one of the lowest. For a first-world country, we have one of the lowest penetrations.

David Read:
Isn’t that interesting? Why do you think that is?

Jenny Stiven:
Because our rural areas don’t have the pipeline to get it to them. Then honestly, because unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon where you fall on the political-economic strata, our competition market, free market means that in some areas you have no competition and in others you have multiple. Prices are very high where there’s no competition and a lot of times that’s in rural areas and they can’t afford it. So, they stick with cable. They stick with what they do have.

Darren Sumner:
So, they have nothing else really?

Jenny Stiven:
They’re on Cox or Spectrum or whatever, but they can’t afford to get the streamers.

Darren Sumner:
It’s a luxury.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s a luxury. What’s interesting is what’s considered cable is genuinely, it’s streaming now. But that isn’t what some of these guys that are doing the Global World Index consider streaming. So, again, part of it is we don’t have a standard of measure, we don’t have a standard of phrasing. All of that comes to bear on the international market and when we can get it to all of our international territories. I know Amazon is better than others at making sure that it gets those individual territory and market licenses as fast as possible. I don’t doubt that it’ll happen. Hopefully they don’t sell individual shows. I think what they’re trying to do, from my understanding with their restructuring two years ago, is that Prime Video in general would be distributed to all of these international territories.

Darren Sumner:
One of the things that Amazon boasts about is Prime Video’s global availability. When they launch a show like Rings of Power, the press releases say it’s available in 240 countries and territories. Ha ha, there’s not 240 countries in the world, “countries and territories.”

Jenny Stiven:
They break it down like that too, which is ironic because Benelux is Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg. Then you have Australia and New Zealand, which is divided into four territories. It’s a mess.

Darren Sumner:
We talk about the importance of the international availability of Stargate, of the existing shows on Prime Video or another service and of the potential of a future Stargate show, a new Stargate show, being available globally same day. It’s mind-blowing compared to what we used to have to deal with between Showtime and Sky and all the other global broadcasters.

Jenny Stiven:
Obviously, comparisons are odious, but Amazon Prime Video gets compared to Netflix on a regular basis, as it should. When you look at Squid Game and you look at what Netflix has done and the time that it put into this, it spent an average of about seven to eight years having all of its availability in… I have to go back and check. I should’ve looked this up before but I think it’s in 78 countries.

David Read:
Seven or eight years to get it to that level of market coverage?

Jenny Stiven:
Yeah.

David Read:
Wow.

Jenny Stiven:
Because they had to, “who’s got access?” Start with first-world countries.

David Read:
Work your way out.

Jenny Stiven:
Also, imagine: seven, eight years ago, they had to convince people that this was legitimate, convince production studios you wanna spend the money to dub or subtitle this to get it. There’s a lot of dominoes that go into this. KCRW had a show a couple of weeks ago where they were saying, “Well, it’s gonna take Amazon seven to eight years.” No, because obviously what Netflix has done, like anything that happens in our industry, they paved the way. Amazon can mimic that. Also, quite frankly, they have a phenomenal international group at Amazon, but MGM’s international group is pretty amazing. While I know Stargate fans are frustrated, the people that are in there doing the work are extraordinarily experienced in international territories and they were absorbed into MGM. You’ve got people who are coming over from MGM with a lot of experience in this area. The hope is that these contracts and distribution deals will slowly be finished out and then Amazon Prime Video Global can say, “Great, then we wanna move forward with this Stargate.” Quite frankly, it could happen parallel, which is what I’m hearing they want it to be, is that they want to push forward. That’s why they’ve put everything back on. All of these are good signs. They’ve put everything back on Prime Video. They’re trying to work out these distribution deals. They’ve woven in people from MGM that they think will have the best impact on the franchises, the top six franchises, which we’ll talk about in a bit, which includes Stargate. All of those things that are happening are the maneuvering of a normal acquisition. All of the details, like international deals, are part of those details.

Darren Sumner:
The last thing I wanna say about our international Stargate community is the international community is hugely important to MGM and now to Amazon. I see lots of comments from folks: “North America gets all the attention. They get everything first. They get stuff on Prime Video.” Financially, the global market is hugely important. We talked when SG-1 was on the air, we talked about it being a billion-dollar franchise for MGM. It doesn’t come from the deal with Syfy Channel.

Jenny Stiven:
No.

Darren Sumner:
The deal with Syfy Channel, the license with Syfy Channel, helps fund the production. I think the show probably more or less broke even at that point. But it was MGM then taking the show to syndication and then globally SG-1 was in, what, 175 countries. That’s where MGM was making its money.

Jenny Stiven:
And their deal with 20th Century Fox, which is where I came in and started working with them, was to distribute home entertainment internationally. That’s where the absolute explosion happened and that was in 2002 to 2004, when that started to take off. That’s why we were able to make the movies; that’s where the bank was coming from. We have a super smart audience. Stargate fans in general, I have said from the beginning, are one of the earliest fandoms to ask for the curtain to be pulled so we can see what’s happening behind the scenes in production, in direction, in show writing. They are very aware of the fact that international money is absolutely where it’s at. I’m working on a new Syfy project right now. We aren’t shooting in the US, we’re gonna shoot in Mexico. So, our production is gonna be Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia and it’s because that’s where we know that the money is. That’s where the distribution is and then we can distribute in the US. That’s happening so much more because, quite frankly, while I love the US audience and I want us to be there, that’s not where I can get production done and it’s not where my partners who are doing production can get it done. There’s no question Amazon and Netflix are leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of the studios when it comes to that. It’s not that Warner Brothers, Sony and all of these guys aren’t extraordinarily aware, as we said, because it’s where they made their bank, but they’re a little bit slower to jump onto the distribution part of international in their shows. Peacock, Paramount+, et cetera, aren’t necessarily as quick, even Disney, to get out to international as Netflix and Amazon are. Again, that’s because they’ve had more time, frankly, to build that pathway and to get out there. That’s a great segue into what’s happening at Amazon and MGM to make Stargate happen. You guys have all read GateWorld. I’m sure everybody listens to David and watches Dial the Gate with the interviews and SciTrek. There are so many rumors going around. Some of them are spot on and some of them are spot on for that moment and then they’re not. This is the bottom line. I’m not dealing in any rumors because it’d be too easy to go down that road. Quite honestly, I literally did a whole bunch of research prepping for this this week and four of the people I talked to contradicted each other. That just had to do with where they are and what they’re hearing.

Darren Sumner:
That’s the hot mess of production.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. I had promised them I wouldn’t quote them anyway; it was just background. But honestly, none of it really pans out for our conversation. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the things that they’re talking about come true, but I’d rather deal in where the facts are right now. What we’ve got is this: Amazon had its own restructuring, like we talked about. A guy named Mike Hopkins has taken over as SVP of Prime Video and Amazon Creative Studios. Amazon Creative Studios is the production company for Amazon, just like any other content division would be at MGM, anyplace else. Under him, as everybody read this week, is Jen Salke, who I love. She is amazing. She was at 20th Century Fox; she was at NBC Universal. She’s done things like This Is Us, Chicago, all the Chicago series with Dick Wolf Productions. She’s got very, very solid creative talent connections in this world. When I was at 20th Century Fox, she was my fourth-level-up boss for Family Guy and things like that. She’s amazing. She is now, as of three days ago, the head of all of Amazon Studios film and television. She came from the Amazon side. She was hired from NBC Universal. She’d been at Amazon, now she’s in charge of all of that. Under her, and this is where things get weird, I’m gonna quote this, and where we care. I’m not talking about unscripted, but I will talk about film division. This is where things get a little confusing. David, because I’m a freak, I’m actually gonna make this as an org chart and send it to you so you guys can post it ’cause I’m a freak about stuff like that.

David Read:
Absolutely. We’ll put it in the link to the description below.

Jenny Stiven:
I didn’t have time to do it, as you saw my chicken scratch.

Darren Sumner:
This is the MGM integration part, right?

Jenny Stiven:
Pardon me?

Darren Sumner:
You’re getting now to the MGM integration part.

Jenny Stiven:
Correct. Vernon Sanders is on the Amazon side and what they’ve done is they all had meetings with Jen Salke with all of the MGM people in scripted television, unscripted television and film. We all saw that Mark Burnett left. I’m gonna have a little sidebar right now about Mark Burnett.

Darren Sumner:
No surprises.

Jenny Stiven:
I worked with Mark Burnett at Fox; I worked with him at MGM. Brilliant. I will never, ever, ever say anything other than he is a brilliant guy when it comes to unscripted television and coming up with good ideas. Eight years at MGM, not one new show that worked. While I was there, was not supportive of Stargate at all and in fact, threw up roadblocks to Stargate and he was on the board. I’ve never been able to say that publicly.

Darren Sumner:
He’s got Survivor under his belt, he’s got The Voice, but since he joined MGM, he sort of brought his whole unscripted division into MGM.

Jenny Stiven:
But there was nothing new.

Darren Sumner:
We didn’t see much come of it.

Jenny Stiven:
No, no. There was nothing new. That happens all the time with production. You bring somebody in as a “shingle,” it’s called a shingle under the parent of the studios because you want them to bring in something that is creative and new and the whole bit didn’t happen. Grom my point of view, not just for Stargate but for other creative content that I saw go across scripted development’s desk, talking with the people over there in scripted content with Steve there, with Rob Hochberg, Chris Ottinger, stuff didn’t happen. It was a hindrance. As the article that I sent you guys, KCRW and Hollywood Reporter were more critical than I am. They say he was an agent of chaos. Now, I didn’t see that, but it may have been that at the top, on the board. All I know is he wasn’t a fan of Stargate, didn’t wanna spend the money.

Darren Sumner:
So, he would’ve had a say on Stargate particularly because he was a member of the board?

Jenny Stiven:
Absolutely. Plus he was head of television.

Darren Sumner:
So, he had some influence there too.

Jenny Stiven:
While we were in the middle of Stargate Command, he became head of television.

David Read:
Ah, I see.

Jenny Stiven:
It was a little bit of a transition, but he was on the board at the time, then became head of television. Look, whatever his reasoning was, which I don’t know ’cause I wasn’t present at those board meetings, but the news that trickled down to the rest of us was he and Nancy Tellem, who was the head of the board at the time, were adamant that Stargate was not where to go. Everybody’s entitled to their opinion. There were lots of fights about it and credit to Michael Brown, Simon Grady, Chris Ottinger, who literally threw their bodies across the line to try to keep it going, make it happen. John Dax; all people who lost their jobs and it’s unfortunate. I’m not really sure why it became the line we do not cross, but it did. So, that’s my little sidebar. Mark Burnett leaves. He’s no longer head of television and now we have, coming in from MGM, Chris Brearton, who was our COO of all of MGM and he is gonna be in charge of MGM+ and MGM Alternate Television, Prime Video service.

Darren Sumner:
I’ll do the footnotes for the people. MGM+ is what Epix is gonna be starting in January. That’s MGM’s now-owned premium cable service, which you can also get as an over-the-top streamer.

Jenny Stiven:
The MGM Alternative hasn’t really been defined exactly. It’s supposed to be the upscale MGM+, plus some other things that are gonna happen. Chris Brearton has been pretty amazing. He’s what I, my entire career, called the difference between the creative guys and the bean counters. The best studios are the ones that combine both, that you have one of each. Chris Brearton comes from a bean-counter background, but he has always worked hand-in-hand with creatives. Always. In this case, that’s exactly what’s gonna be happening; he’ll be working with Jen Salke and others. Of everybody, I am so happy that he’s coming over. Separate from that, Chris Ottinger will also be coming over. I’m not gonna talk about it, but licensing and merchandising or what’s considered acquisitions, Amazon’s a little bit different in its hierarchy. It’s got a couple of new people over there. Chris Ottinger will be over in acquisitions, which is essentially what he was doing at MGM. He’ll only be reporting one up at that time. Marketing, Sue Kroll came in at Amazon. Steven Bruno will be coming over. So, the supplemental divisions, we can talk about that another time.

Darren Sumner:
I know the names Chris Brearton and Chris Ottinger. I think Chris Ottinger I met on the midway.

Jenny Stiven:
You did.

David Read:
Correct.

Jenny Stiven:
You did.

Darren Sumner:
Those two Chris’ are both on Team Stargate?

Jenny Stiven:
Yes.

David Read:
Ottinger definitely.

Jenny Stiven:
Ottinger definitely is. Ottinger is a huge geek, huge geek. It’s not Stargate, he loves RoboCop, he loves all of it. He’s also very much about the international distribution. He’s the one that’s the big drum beater with his department about making sure that international distribution happens appropriately.

Darren Sumner:
And he gets streaming.

Jenny Stiven:
And streaming. So, he’ll be there. Chris Brearton’s the name to remember with, and this is important, Michael Wright. Michael Wright came from Epix, came over to MGM, was in charge of scripted development at MGM and now he will be in charge of all of MGM+. Chris Brearton, essentially his title is gonna be I’m at Amazon Studios and I’m in charge of all of the SVOD stuff. So, MGM+, MGM Alternative, Prime Video for Corporate Strategy. Then Michael Wright, who is a huge Stargate fan, is in charge of MGM+. This is really, really good for us. So, I wanna repeat this. You have Jen Salke, who is a huge talent supporter. She loves creative concepts. She loves creative television. Under her will be Chris Brearton. Chris will actually report to Mike Hopkins, but whatever. Chris Brearton will be running corporate strategy for Prime Video, MGM+, MGM Alternative. Michael Wright, also from MGM, will be running MGM+, where if Stargate’s gonna go somewhere, it’s one of the places. I will address this rumor, it is one of the places that is most likely right now where Stargate would go. We’ll address that content thing a bit later. The second part of this that’s really important is you’ve got scripted U.S. and scripted SVOD television, and those are the ones that are gonna be actually making the decisions about what ideas go forward. There’s brand-new people there, both of whom are huge sci-fi fans, especially Lindsay Sloane, who’s in charge of the U.S. one. They’re not from MGM; they came from other places or within Amazon. Those are the basics. There’s a lot, but those are the basics. The thing that we need to really hang our hat on is all of this restructuring and MGM weaving MGM people into Amazon, ’cause let’s remember now MGM doesn’t really exist as its own silo; it’s woven into Amazon Creative Studios. It’s under essentially Jen Salke, Amazon Studios Television and Film. One of the things that I wanted to address when it comes to that next is content and distribution, which we’ve already talked a little bit about international distribution. Content, where is it gonna go? Does it go to the film division? Does it go to scripted television? This is one rumor I wanna address ’cause I think it’s important. There are probably three or four solid rumors out there about the fact that Amazon went to MGM and said, “Look, we love Brad Wright. We love his ideas. We love his universe. We’re not thrilled with his script,” which we’ve all known that for a while. It got put on a back burner. MGM loved it. MGM banged the drum for it. They really wanted it. Their division really wanted it, but it really didn’t fit, and I think this is fair, how Amazon was looking. I wanna break this down for people, ’cause I think this is really important. When Brad wrote that script, it was appropriate for where MGM was at the time. He wrote that script and submitted it prior to the sale, prior to COVID. His plan and his decision-making with his own production company, with Chris, with the head of scripted television at the time, Steve and those guys, it was a completely different world. What he wrote and what that was gonna be was appropriate to that particular setup, that equation. The variables aren’t just changed, they’re blown apart. I give Amazon and MGM credit because they kept Brad on the table this whole time. I don’t think he’s gone per se; I just don’t know what that equation looks like with him in it. We’ve all seen the tweet from Brad. I don’t know that he’s talked to anybody. When I talked to him, he hadn’t. I think he’s looking at, “Hey, it’s been essentially on the back burner. It’s a different setup now. Let’s be realistic.” That’s my guess. Now we’ve got Amazon woven in with the MGM scripted. We have new people in scripted development now and a lot of MGM scripted people came over, but the heads are different and you’ve got a whole different setup about how it will be distributed. Amazon has said from the beginning that they were more interested in establishing this as a massive franchise and that’s where I think we need to look at this positively. We would love Brad to be a part of this, all of us would. From when we first did this last summer, a year and a half ago, all three of us and everybody following and all of the new channels and all the people that are talking about it have said the same thing. “We all love Brad, but we all want Stargate.” We know that those two may not meet.

David Read:
Not for the next chapter.

Jenny Stiven:
I don’t know. I gotta be honest, this is where talking to the four different people, I get very different stories. Considering that this infrastructure just changed, just happened, I think we don’t make any conclusions about that.

Darren Sumner:
It might be a different chapter where Brad plays a different part.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

Darren Sumner:
Hopefully he has some kind of involvement and the world that he helped to create doesn’t go away. I think part of our preoccupation with Brad as fans is not just we love him as a writer and as a creator. “The Shrine,” “Abyss,” I mean, come on. But also, we love the world that he made and we don’t wanna reboot.

David Read:
He’s the symbol of that tangent of Stargate canon from the feature film.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

David Read:
They could be done with it and say, “OK, what we’re gonna do next is a different tangent.”

Jenny Stiven:
They could. We’ve said this from the very beginning when we talked about this last year, that every time we hear a rumor or we talk about it, that’s true at that moment. When we talked about the fact that Brad was having meetings with MGM, that was happening after the sale, but nothing came of it. His pilot, that series, like I said, was part of an equation that no longer exists. Let’s look at what does exist. Amazon wants this franchise to be a massive franchise and they’re looking at three different ways that this can happen. You start with a film and it goes to a series. They are very interested, and I know, David, I think you’re gonna list the articles in the description. The MovieWeb article, and honestly, it was also the Deadline article. Amazon has committed a billion dollars to theatrical events content. Part of what was quoted by Mike Hopkins, who’s above Jen Salke, was Stargate. He listed all of their franchises.

Darren Sumner:
When the deal went through, he listed basically all the big, high-profile MGM franchises.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. He repeated that with this new news. So, this was two weeks ago, I think.

David Read:
November 23rd.

Darren Sumner:
What they’re saying is that Amazon wants to put four movies in the theaters every year. Something like that.

Jenny Stiven:
What they wanna do, I think the number is important, it’s a billion dollars a year. Let’s look at that in context. Netflix spent $6 billion over the past two years on new content. Amazon’s looking at a billion dollars a year just for theatrical content.

David Read:
8 to 10 films annually.

Jenny Stiven:
I think that’s what they’re looking at. That’s one of the ways this could happen. OK? It could be a film. I’m not getting into who would write it, what canon. It would be a film and they would then want a series to back that up. The second way they could do this is that it is a series. We start with a series and one of the reasons they would do a series would be one of two reasons. You’ve got content on the table already. There are rumors there is other content from The Expanse writers. There are rumors that there is other content from The Boys group production company. Like I said, it’s all very messy. I think what we need to look at there is if a series gets started, we don’t know who would be brought in, but we do know this: it is unlikely that Amazon, if you look at their history, is gonna cut out the fan base and the existing canon based on what they’ve done in the past. So, for instance, looking at what they want to do with MGM when they talked about RoboCop, what they want to do with MGM when they’ve talked about Legally Blonde, they’re not gonna throw out the canon completely on these. They’re not gonna throw out the universe of these. One of them’s already in production. I think we can feel comfortable, especially with Jen Salke and others who would be in charge of this, they’re not gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater. What it looks like, I have no idea, because, like I said, there seems to be literally three different lookbook content bibles on the table right now.

David Read:
But a cold, fresh start is not at this point very likely based on what you’re reading in the tea leaves.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s my third option and this is where I don’t know. The third option would be they would do a complete reboot, start from fresh, have it be on MGM+ and it’s its own thing. That doesn’t mean that the others wouldn’t happen, but that could be the third option if they think that that is something that they can financially get going quickly. Remember, Brearton and Michael Wright are gonna be looking at what content can we populate MGM+ with the fastest. That will be existing catalog, that will be new content and that will be content they buy. I think one of the hard parts about this is that Amazon, as a number of other people have talked about recently, doesn’t necessarily create its own content. I’m not gonna redo this. David, you’ve talked about this, Darren, you wrote a whole bunch of articles, SciTrek actually did a great breakdown of this. All of this also depends on who do they go to, what’s their idea? Like I said, there’s three or four rumors and people who have, “seen things” that I’ve talked to, on the table, which are all over the place. It covers the spectrum. It is a movie that goes into a series. It’s a brand-new series. It’s a complete reboot. It’s living in the universe, but explores people we never… It’s crazy. When you look at the conversations about what’s happening at DC, and I think that there are parallels here, there’s a TikTok. I’m so sorry I’m blanking. I will get back to you. There’s a guy who did a TikTok that is absolutely brilliant, in 60 seconds, where he says, “Hey, so, James Gunn, so happy that you’re here, so happy that you’re on board, but we need to go through the list of things that you need to make sure that you do.” Then he goes through the list of, “OK, so, we have a Batman that’s a standalone, but then we don’t wanna piss off Joaquin Phoenix. Then we have three Jokers.” He goes through the whole thing. “Then we have Suicide Squad, we love your first one, not so keen about the second one. So, we like these, but we don’t like these.”

Darren Sumner:
Green Lantern, please.

Jenny Stiven:
I know.

Darren Sumner:
For the love of God.

Jenny Stiven:
I know, I would love a Green Lantern. I would flip over Green Lantern. Then we love Gal Gadot, but we don’t like ’84, so we have to retcon that. I’ll get you guys the link. It is 60 seconds where I keep watching it, ’cause I start crying I’m laughing so hard.

David Read:
They’ve got so much in play, so many balls in the air with so many different creatives behind it. Some are still there, some are out. What do you do?

Jenny Stiven:
This is, I think, what encourages me about this is, I wanna repeat, Michael Wright, Chris Brearton, Chris Ottinger and a couple of others that have now been absorbed into Amazon, where they are reporting directly to the people who are gonna make the decisions, and they themselves are making decisions about what content is gonna be on Prime Video. Chris Brearton’s in charge of corporate strategy for Prime Video. Part of that strategy is franchise management. So, what franchises? Obviously, Stargate is one of those and it’s been listed as one.

David Read:
It’s been listed.

Jenny Stiven:
Right now, based on what I’ve heard, my guess is that they, if they can do it, they wanna start with a movie and go to a series. They really genuinely wanna make this a tent-pole franchise. Cool. What that content is, I’m hearing, like I said, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Completely in canon, they’re gonna bring Brad on, but it’s gonna be a whole new group of people that are writers and the whole bit. A complete reboot. We’re gonna nod to Brad Wright, we’re gonna nod to Roland Emmerich, but otherwise, screw it, we’re doing our own thing. By the way, let’s remember that there’s Lionsgate waiting in the background, who owns the movie of Stargate. It’s all crazy. I think one of the things that’s exciting for me about this is, we finally have this structure in place. They are finally gonna start to make decisions. MGM+ is supposed to launch January 15th. I’m not sure that’s gonna happen exactly the way they plan it, based on what I’m hearing.

David Read:
What’s in it?

Jenny Stiven:
These announcements over the past two weeks is earlier than I expected. I expected them to make these announcements in January, ’cause that would’ve been a year and that’s normal. I think they’re fast-tracking certain franchises, quite frankly. Again, sorry, I wanna separate. The rumor I’ve heard is that they fast-tracked Legally Blonde. My understanding is that Stargate is one of those top-five franchises that they are trying to fast-track.

David Read:
Why do you suspect this has been moved up in time? You think that they’re seeing that the circle is closing down, in terms of the volume of streaming services that are out there and they wanna get their seat at the table faster than originally anticipated?

Jenny Stiven:
I think it’s multiple things. I think that they had to wait a year for the deal to go through. I think that there were people internally, like Mike Hopkins, who had been working with higher-ups at Amazon to have this infrastructure in place. I think he had the infrastructure ready; I think he had the org chart ready. I think he was waiting for the right people. Then, of course, some people left that he didn’t expect, came on board. Honestly, this could’ve happened this summer, but they lost some people they didn’t expect. I think that it is in the timeframe that makes sense, if you think about the year they had to wait for approvals. I think they had a lot of time to talk with MGM. I know they were having multiple meetings on a weekly basis with MGM folks during that year, so I think that there were already conversations. Obviously, there were because Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy left within, whatever it was, two weeks of the announcement. In fact, I know they didn’t have the scripted TV figured out at all. I don’t think Mark Burnett was ever gonna stay. I think, how was that gonna go? Was he gonna have a shingle under Amazon? I know those were some of the conversations going on. I think the other thing that pushed this is end of year. They lost a lot of time with COVID. They had enough in the can that, like Netflix, they were able to really push a lot of streaming stuff out and have some closed sets that they could get some amazing things done, like The Boys, and certainly they were doing pre-production for Rings of Power. Now they don’t have a lot in the can and I think they want to make sure that in this restructure…I shouldn’t say they don’t have a lot in the can, but when you’re Amazon, you wanna have 20 to 30 ready to go over a two-year period, two to three years.

Darren Sumner:
A little bit of everything spread across multiple genres for different audiences.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

David Read:
You don’t wanna go out of the news for more than a couple of weeks.

Jenny Stiven:
No, and you’re not a film studio where you can release four to nine movies a year and be OK. That’s not how it works. I think that their announcement about doing theatrical is ballsy. It hasn’t been proven that that can work. If I’m comparing Netflix and Amazon, I think Amazon has done a really amazing job, where they released during COVID in 2021 and ’22, they would do a week or a two-week theatrical and then it went straight to Prime Video. Or they went straight to Prime Video, but they treated it like it was a theatrical release marketing-wise. I think that was brilliant, because what they were doing was doing A/B testing. It didn’t really cost them a lot to do it and it also kept the theatrical distributors happy. They did that prior to Netflix doing it; Netflix did it with Glass Onion, with Knives Out. Amazon, I think, did it first and I think they were doing it during COVID, if I remember correctly. I can’t remember what release it was. So, they’ve done all this A/B testing. So, to your point, I think they’re ready. I think they were like, “You know what? We’ve got the MGM+. We’ve pulled in Epix. We’ve done all our work. We’ve done all the strategy. We did all the restructuring and shuffling that we wanna do for right now. We feel really strong about this. Let’s get going. Let’s get this stuff done. Let’s get on.” That’s why they bought MGM; they bought it for the catalog. Wednesday was already under production and it went to Netflix. It was already promised to Netflix.

Darren Sumner:
That’s a separate thing. It did well.

Jenny Stiven:
It did phenomenally; it was second only to Squid Game. I think that that’s still gonna happen. Just like MGM would syndicate to different channels, I don’t necessarily think that everything MGM produces with Amazon is gonna be on Prime Video or MGM+. I think that’s their Blue Sky. If they get a great distribution deal that gets them international play like with Netflix – they could have fought the Netflix deal and they didn’t. They didn’t have to. It was like, “You know what? This is great. We don’t have to worry about it. Netflix handles it. Netflix is doing the marketing. We don’t have to spend that money. Hot shit. Good to go.”

Darren Sumner:
That’s one thing that that seems clearer to me now after the news of the last couple of weeks, is that MGM is not gonna get absorbed and everything they make is not gonna go to Prime Video. Amazon’s priority is not to shut down Hulu or Netflix; their priority is to make money. If they can sell shows to all these different outlets like MGM has been doing for decades, that’s what they’re gonna do, ’cause it’s gonna make them the most money.

Jenny Stiven:
Nobody knows the answer, either. I just had this conversation. David knows, literally I talk about this all the time and I am so sorry, because I’m gonna say it again for the millionth time. I literally just had a conversation with a guy that runs a production studio locally in L.A. It’s an independent production studio, but he’s working with Zack Snyder and with all these guys and he said, “Jen, nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing,” because nobody knows what is gonna happen technologically. If you look at what’s happening with streaming, so I’m talking about distribution, I’m talking about production. Nobody knows what’s going to work with an audience that is absolutely all over the place. You have the most amount of generations ever in the history of man alive at the same time. Of those generations, the bulk percentage are looking at, I forget how many hours. It was five hours a day on streaming, television, their phone, whatever it is.

David Read:
A day?

Jenny Stiven:
That includes sports and unscripted and everything. I’m talking about everything as content. So, we’re talking a billion people out of now eight billion people, it may be more than that. From the stats I looked at in the summer, it could be more than that now. That means you have this wide spectrum of people who like a lot of different things and aren’t liking just one thing. I like sci-fi. I like all sci-fi. I also love stupid Hallmark Christmas rom-com. I am all over the place. I like Chicago PD and I’m not unusual.

David Read:
Also, the genres of consumption. I mean, not to derail, but how much money did Zuck sink into Meta and now is laying off a ton because it’s too early.

Jenny Stiven:
That is the point: it’s not just the content spectrum. It’s the technology, platform, distribution spectrum that nobody has the answers. If you think about the cable revolution and how that became bundling eventually. We have, in essence, the internet revolution, and now we have, people are calling it all kinds of things, but let’s say streaming, technology, OTT, platform revolution. It is not just the biggest group of people ever, it is not just the broadest content offered ever, it is the broadest way to watch ever. None of these guys know the answer. This brings it back to your question, David, of was this something they sped up? I think that Amazon is being very smart about doing their A/B testing. I think what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna take MGM content, they’re gonna let it go to Netflix. They’re gonna put it on MGM+. They’re gonna put it on Prime Video. They’re gonna syndicate it out in Australia and Benelux and Japan and South Korea and see how it goes. I think what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna look at genres and they’re gonna get massive amount of focus testing back, because that’s what we do by watching it. If you watch it all the way through, they know it. If you only watch part of it and come back, they know that. They break those numbers down and they look at where did they watch it, how did they watch it.

David Read:
If a lot of sci-fi is being consumed on Netflix, wouldn’t you rather put something potentially sci-fi-ish there, or try to bring them over to an MGM+ and slash the audience numbers?

Jenny Stiven:
The Expanse was an enormous success and we were able to have two seasons that we paid for with the production company. I’m blanking on it, the name Panda something. I think the other thing is this, which I think is fascinating. I think that Amazon is gonna play with the content within its own Prime Video and MGM+. Remember, we still have marketing and licensing and merchandising over here. This is my feeling: I think Amazon is doing a better job of that testing and very carefully looking at how that’s gonna move forward than Netflix. Head-to-head, slightly different strategies as well. Amazon is ultimately trying to separate its creative studios from its e-commerce while also simultaneously having its licensing and merchandising connected to its e-commerce, which is connected to all of the franchises. I think if there’s anybody that they are comparing themselves to, it’s Disney. This is where I wanted to bring this back: Amazon is doing something very different with its acquisition of MGM. Disney did not keep most of the heads of state from Fox. When it got rid of them, like Peter Chernin and others, it failed, and now they’re gonna look to bring them back. I think Amazon looked around at what worked and what didn’t work and what they thought was, “OK, cool. We’re gonna look at those lessons, but also, how does it fit our structure? We’ve just restructured. We’ve just redone this in Creative Studios area, Prime Video area only. I’m not talking about e-commerce. How does all of this fit in? We’ve bought it, now what?” OK. “We know we wanted it, we know we needed it, looking at the long term for us. 10 years from now, we wanna have some of the best content and we wanna be one of the major places that people go to look for any of this content, whatever it is.” OK, cool. So, if you go to Amazon and you’re a Prime subscriber, they are the only ones that are genuinely bundling right now. You don’t have to go to CBS Interactive separately. Roku does this, but Amazon Prime has its own bundling. You can get Starz and Showtime and CBS, because they have deals with them as a distributor, as well as a content creator. I’m not even gonna get into whether or not this is a massive monopoly issue and an antitrust thing.

David Read:
We keep on wanting to bring it up, but we have to keep on tabling it.

Jenny Stiven:
I think we should talk about that on another show.

David Read:
We need to.

Jenny Stiven:
The free-market economy ceases to be a free-market economy when you have, and this has always been an issue in the entertainment industry, your creator, your producer, your distributor all in one. On the one hand, I think what Amazon’s doing is amazingly smart, and on the other hand, the creator in me is cringing, going, “My God, there’s no competition here.” If you’re a Prime subscriber and you look at the Prime Video list, it will list the bundles that you can do and it makes it extremely easy for you to do it, and that’s the key.

Darren Sumner:
More of an à la carte experience than you could get someplace like Comcast. I can go turn on and off my Paramount+ addition to Prime Video at the drop of a hat when Star Trek is on and pay nine bucks.

Jenny Stiven:
That kind of attrition and churn rate, people hear churn all the time and I’m sure everybody knows what it is. What it basically means is if you’re SVOD, which is subscription video on demand, and you only sign up for The Mandalorian, and then you bump out-

David Read:
I’m done. But I’m not gonna turn my Amazon Prime off because I like the shipping.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s called churn.

David Read:
And they know that.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly, this is where Prime Video has done an amazing job, where they don’t really care. They don’t care if you turn CBS, Paramount+ on and off. They don’t care if you watch it for one show and then turn it off, because you’re still on Amazon Prime.

Darren Sumner:
It matters to CBS because Paramount knows that I’m gonna turn it off when there’s not Star Trek on, so it’s in CBS’s interest to keep Star Trek on year-round.

David Read:
Year-round, something new. There are five shows going right now.

Darren Sumner:
Amazon knows I got the base subscription, I’m gonna go add something else.

Jenny Stiven:
I think that that also gets back to our conversation about none of us are single-silo content watchers. What Amazon’s gonna try to do, and what Paramount+, honestly, is trying to do, and not doing a bad job of it, is say, “Look, if you’re with us, we will be your catchall. You could go to any genre you want and the reason we’re not Netflix is because we also have all the new movies.” Netflix gets that, but they don’t get all the deals. Amazon gets the majority of the new movies; they get the majority of the deals for new shows. That’s how they started. Prime Video started as, essentially, a syndication. It was a channel like any other. They bought the movies; they bought the syndication for the shows. You could watch them there if you had missed it on broadcast. Part of the problem with Peacock is that Peacock doesn’t have all of the shows in a series sometimes, especially if it’s a new one. Paramount+ was doing that, it has now stopped doing that. If you wanted to go watch Ghosts, if you wanted to watch any of the Chicago shows, if you wanted to watch Equalizer, Star Trek, it will have all of the seasons, all of the shows, if you’ve paid for it. I think what Amazon’s trying to do is say, “We are your one-stop shopping,” which is really, genuinely, what they’ve always been, what they’ve always done. I don’t see this as being radically different, and this, David, goes back to your point, from what they did with e-commerce. It is easy for them to say, “OK, we got our structure. Let’s go. Let’s do it. Let’s get it done,” ’cause they’ve got the resources to get it done. They’ve got the people packed in there.

David Read:
They can course-correct along the way with what works and what doesn’t.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. They will test like they’ve already done and I think that’s a good thing. Here’s what I wanna bring back that’s positive. Let’s remember Chris Brearton, Chris Ottinger, Michael Wright. I don’t know if they’re gonna go in there. I’ll be honest, if I was pulled over from MGM, I don’t know if I would go, “OK, damn it. We gotta do Stargate.” I don’t know if I would do that. I don’t know if they would feel comfortable doing that. All I’m saying is that I know that these are three people who supported Stargate when I was there. I have heard since then that they still support the Stargate franchise and think that it is not just viable, but it has not been, since it went off the air, truly, correctly utilized and leveraged. I know all three of those men feel that way very strongly, that it has never been leveraged the way it should have been post-broadcast after it ended. So, that’s really positive. I think the big question mark is how does Amazon’s group, that those three people are coming in with who are all brand-new, and Lindsay Sloane, who would be the one who would make that decision, sorry, I don’t know if it’s a he or a she, in scripted television. Are they gonna look at other things first? They may have new stuff on the board that they want MGM to do. I don’t know. Again, remember, MGM doesn’t make their own, so they have to have a production company that’s willing to come in. They have to have a distribution deal if they’re not gonna do it on Prime Video. That’s what pays for it. So, going back to the international money. A lot of times what you’ve got is scripted television will say yes, but if you can’t sell it to a production company, it doesn’t matter, it’ll stall out. Those are the big question marks, but the positive news is that we’ve got the right people in there to hopefully say it. Everything I’m hearing from both Amazon and MGM people is, “Hey, Stargate’s our franchise. It’s one of the top five.” Something is gonna happen, we don’t know what that something is.

David Read:
It has its own built-in international audience. Amazon keeps on pushing, “Well, we wanna create international shows.” You don’t have to look farther than The Atlantis Expedition to see that they have a product that works. 40% of Dial the Gate’s audience is the United States, the other 60% – I’m sure Darren can relate with GateWorld – it’s all of them, 2% this country, 2% this country, 3% this country. It’s all the whole planet, for crying out loud.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. It always has been. When we were first doing Stargate Command, I don’t know if these numbers are still true, I doubt it, but we had between one and three million active fans still. Of that, it was almost exactly the same. It was a high 40 percents in the US and all the rest was international. That was in 2019.

Darren Sumner:
It’s amazing that it’s still that way. People are still watching the show somewhere. It’s on Stan and it’s on, I don’t know who else is airing it in your local regions. The fact that people can still find the show…

David Read:
They’re still searching for it in Google.

Darren Sumner:
…if it’s online on Prime Video or on Netflix where you live.

Jenny Stiven:
I think what I’d be curious to know from your guys’ point of view is, I think we’ve addressed some of the rumors. I think we need to say, “Hey, look, none of us know if any of these rumors are gonna come true.” I’ve said, all of us who are talking about Stargate online, on YouTube, writing about it on GateWorld, David talking about it with Dial the Gate and talking with talent who actually does talk because they’re still in production, they talk to producers and showrunners and people in Vancouver who are all still connected, or Toronto or L.A. All of these rumors may be true at that moment…but then wait two weeks. It’s like whatever they say about the weather in Chicago. Wait a moment and the weather changes. Wait two weeks and the rumor will be dead and then there’s a new rumor. If you think about it, the equation has changed, and so your variables are moving parts over at Amazon and MGM. There’s a marketing meeting and the marketing meeting can only deal with what’s in front of them. They’ve been told, “Hey, you need to have something ready if we pull the trigger on A, B, or C for Stargate.” That gets leaked out and it sounds like something’s already done. No. A typical marketing meeting is always; you have three parts in your marketing meeting. The first is what’s just released, what’s coming up, what’s on deck. Then what’s six weeks out, what’s the next campaign. Then what’s a year out. That’s always what you’re talking about in a marketing meeting. You don’t always get to that third one, but that’s always what you’re gonna talk about. Same in licensing and merchandising, which is dealing with three to five-year licenses. A lot of times these rumors will come from a supplemental department that is completely accurate, but it doesn’t have any base or foundation yet for us to hang our hat on, basically.

Darren Sumner:
That’s a good way to put it

Jenny Stiven:
What I’m waiting for is where can we hang our hat? Where’s the information out of the now-new scripted development television or scripted development film, with Chris Brearton and Michael Wright at MGM+? Those four people, when they come out and say something, then I’d be willing to hang my hat on it.

Darren Sumner:
There are some rumors that might be fake, they might be made up or speculative and then there are some rumors, as you say, that might be true in the moment, but they’re not gonna go anywhere. It almost doesn’t matter if the rumor is true or not.

Jenny Stiven:
And we don’t know.

Darren Sumner:
Unless it gets to that point where we can hang our hat on it, whether it’s something concrete or eventually it’s a press release that is the announcement of a production.

Jenny Stiven:
I do wanna address one rumor that I find fascinating. I had heard this from somewhere else. I know SciTrek did it too and I don’t know, Darren, if you wrote about it. But Mark Fergus, who is, the Expanse, has been rumored…

Darren Sumner:
I’ve been meaning to ask you about this.

Jenny Stiven:
I heard this actually a long time ago, but I didn’t put any credence in it. Let me back up for a second. Scripted development at MGM was asking for lots of ideas across the board for its franchises prior to the buy.

Darren Sumner:
As in for people to come in and pitch to them?

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. They had been pushing, this is prior to the buy, for sci-fi. That’s why Brad’s pilot was super popular internally and everybody was supporting it. COVID happens, the buy happens, and during COVID it already had been put on hold ’cause nobody could meet. Then the buy happens and before we had this new infrastructure, you already had new people in scripted development over at Amazon Studios. They had restructured in 2021 where they have a huge sci-fi fantasy silo. There was a call from Amazon Studios, Creative Studios, for pitches from production companies. It wasn’t specific to Stargate; this was sci-fi fantasy. Look at what just happened with The Boys. A lot of their internal research people and data people were looking at the same things that I was, the report saying the most generations ever are watching right now, Sci-fi fantasy is one of the biggest, and obviously superheroes, which is a slightly different division, are watching that. It’s also why you see a rise in rom-coms and romance, because there’s a huge section of people that just watch that as well.

Darren Sumner:
Amazon’s got all our user data. They know when I turn on my Paramount Plus+ for Star Trek and when I turn it off again. They can aggregate that and tell what’s the concentrated portion of their audience that’s sci-fi.

Jenny Stiven:
This is the other reason I think Amazon is so smart. Again, always gonna say this caveat, the creative part of me is like, “Oh my God, this is really antitrust waiting to happen.” Because they’ve bundled these subscriptions, they get information that they would never get otherwise. For instance, Disney and the rest of these are extremely reluctant to release these numbers. They don’t want to. They’re supposed to because they’re, hey, a public company, but they don’t. So, it’s very interesting. Netflix has finally started to release its numbers like it just did with Wednesday. But at the same time, they won’t release, after that top 10, they don’t release any of those numbers. So, you have no idea what’s happening in their genres, for instance. I would kill to have Netflix research report on their genres. My God, I would kill for that.

Darren Sumner:
But Amazon, like Rings of Power, they’ve only given a top-tier number. One big number and no breakdown.

Jenny Stiven:
Nobody does it. But what they have internally is, they’ve got access to that CBS, to that Paramount+ to the Starz…

Darren Sumner:
Because of all those bundled subscriptions in Prime Video. But let me ask you the really creepy question, which is, Amazon owns AWS, Amazon Web Services, and they own a lot of the backbone infrastructure for other platforms, like Netflix uses AWS. Do the executives at Amazon know some of Netflix’s numbers?

Jenny Stiven:
No. There is a genuine firewall, literally between AWS.

Darren Sumner:
That’s interesting.

Jenny Stiven:
There is a couple of reasons. The FCC, which is the Federal Communications Chair and the entire department, and the FTC, which run the trade, would come down all over them. As much as I’m frustrated that there aren’t enough antitrust suits or at least meetings about some of these acquisitions, the one thing they’ve been hyper about, as we’ve seen with the Senate hearings with Zuckerberg and others, is the separation of tech, the tech you own, and that distribution of content. AWS exists as a completely separate company. Now, it doesn’t mean that Bezos doesn’t own it, and it does get a little weird when you’ve got Washington Post and Netflix and all of these on AWS, let alone, let’s not even get into the e-commerce that all use AWS. Amazon’s competitors, like Walmart and Target and others, are all using AWS.

Darren Sumner:
But there’s a firewall.

Jenny Stiven:
There’s a firewall.

David Read:
But is that a third party that’s monitoring that? How would we really know if Amazon’s… Amazon’s the fox guarding that henhouse when the henhouse has all of their content in there and everyone else is, “Oh, no, we don’t look at it.” How would you know? Unless you have someone with the infrastructure that knew how to read the infrastructure.

Jenny Stiven:
There are checks and balances. In terms of a third-party monitoring, I will say this. There is supposed to be an FCC monitor that does an independent audit, I think, once a year of all these guys. I don’t know if that happens, quite frankly, because of resources. It’s not to get political, but a lot of these departments were cut back drastically post-2016. They lost a lot of people. They lost a lot of resources to do this kind of investigation, to do this kind of straight-up monitoring and reporting. That’s been built back up, but you lose four years, of which in those four years AWS became one of the biggest server farms, essentially, for lack of a better word, for all of these competitors that are on the same servers. They are supposed to be monitored once a year. They are supposed to check in and give annual reports about what’s been happening. Honestly, I would say, having been in this industry long enough, there are, I am sure, lots of people who have shared reports because that is the way it happens too. There is some interest in that. Netflix would say, “Hey, I know you’re not supposed to share this, but can you give me a top line of what you had at AWS for traffic?” For something. Someone might share that verbally. I think that if any of that did happen, I’m pretty sure, look, I would like to think the best of people. I’m pretty sure people would be reported pretty damn fast. The creepy question is legit and I think we have to keep asking those questions because the more you ask it publicly, it’s not behind any kind of filter. The FCC and FTC monitoring is public record, so anybody can look it up. If it doesn’t exist, it means it hasn’t happened. Or they didn’t file it because you don’t have enough people to upload it to the site. It is supposed to be public record when they’ve been monitored.

Darren Sumner:
Thank you for satisfying my question. [inaudible] when ultimately we’re dealing with these giant faceless corporations and more and more things are owned by fewer and fewer companies.

Jenny Stiven:
Again, like I said, Amazon on the one hand, I, as a user, I love the ease of it. As a content creator, I love the fact that there’s so many different ways that this could be bundled and my content could be distributed. I’m not a content creator, but as a producer of people who create content, I love the fact that there are all these options. As a creative person and an independent consultant, like I said, it makes me cringe because it worries me. However, and this is the one thing I do wanna bring up that is something that I would love for us to talk about again. It is 100% a Wild West frontier right now. Technologically, how you get your content and how it will happen a year from now, two, three years from now is gonna be wildly different. The best way that this is applicable to what’s happening with Stargate is to think about it for anybody who was alive and working in the ’90s. After the writers’ strike in ’87, there was a massive change within the studio system and it’s when Kirk Kerkorian sold off a lot of the MGM stuff to Ted Turner and there was a breakdown of the studio system. From that was a rise of independent studios and independent producers, independent showrunners in television. It’s when you started to see a real breakout in the cable system, where you had producers who were only producing content for cable, not for broadcast. That had never happened prior to, between 1987 and 1992.

David Read:
Not the big three. What are you, gonna just throw it away?

Jenny Stiven:
I know.

David Read:
You gotta start somewhere.

Jenny Stiven:
You had ESPN and CNN starting. Of course, CNN broke its success, all of it, on the first Gulf War. That’s when they started doing 24-hour genuine content. For people who wanted to create content and put it somewhere else, that was that rise. We can liken it then to that and then in ’97 to 2000 was the rise of the internet and the fall of the internet companies that didn’t make it because it rose too fast, collapsed. What happened with that collapse is you have the ones who could really deliver. The same thing is happening with crypto and blockchain. You’re having the rise of the ones that don’t work, it’ll collapse and then you’ll have the consistency. You have also the rise of OTT, which was crazy three years ago. COVID happens; it was even crazier. Then it collapsed.

Darren Sumner:
Over the top streaming.

Jenny Stiven:
Sorry, over the top streaming. So, if you think about all of the different distribution channels and I say distribution channels literally, all the different places that you as a user and as a producer or a content creator can deliver content, whether it’s YouTube or streaming or independent production companies who put it out there on their own on different channels. Twitch, which is now creating its own content. It has a scripted content department now. There are so many different places that you can get content. It’s the Wild West. It makes it hard for users, and the reason the bundling that Amazon is doing is, I think, positive for us is that there are so many different places that Stargate could be out, and it might not be in canon. It might not be something that we’d be interested in. It could be this little thing over here or this little thing over here. Having it with Amazon, I genuinely believe, outside of Disney, was the best place for us to land.

David Read:
Financially it’ll look good. I think that there’s a lot at play. Every time we do one of these, I’m less and less likely to think that it’s gonna be Brad’s version of the next something. But at the same time, as long as it’s Stargate, that’s the reason I fell in love with it.

Darren Sumner:
Sorry, Jenny, before I interrupted you with that question, we were talking about MGM, Amazon soliciting pitches and Mark Fergus. As far as you know, any truth in the rumors that some of the more successful genre shows that have been on Amazon, like The Boys and The Expanse, that those writers have pitched or have been invited to pitch something Stargate related?

Jenny Stiven:
That rumor is true. What happened was that you had the MGM people who had done it prior to the buy, and then Amazon, because of its sci-fi silo, had sent out the call for lots of sci-fi fantasy, and still are. It’s still a silo they’re really working, as well as procedural and some others that they’ve decided to focus on. One of the things that was done was that they would say with certain production companies that they had either already worked with or were really excited about, like Mark Fergus and Hawk, his partner, and said, “Hey, we loved what you’ve done. What would you like to do?” They said, my understanding is they said Stargate. I had heard this prior to when SciTrek had talked about it. I didn’t know for sure if it was real, because again, you hear a lot of comments sometimes or rumors that are, what’s the word I want? Trying to make something happen.

David Read:
Trying to spur it. “Do a thing.”

Jenny Stiven:
They would’ve loved Mark Fergus to do this and he would be amazing.

Darren Sumner:
I think it makes sense. Look at sci-fi shows that are on the platform. Expanse was one of my favorite shows of, I don’t know, the last decade, of probably my adulthood. It makes sense to look at those shows and say, “Ooh, wouldn’t it be cool if the creators of that took a whack at Stargate, [inaudible] chance to do it.”

David Read:
Or John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic. That would be so cool. Then they give him a movie where they do it. “Oh my God.” Now we’ve done it. Now we’re moving on.

Jenny Stiven:
Or Deadpool. Honestly, Deadpool happened 100% because of fans and because Ryan Reynolds was a fan himself, made a fan film. It can happen that way. That’s only one group. I can’t talk about the other ones I’ve heard about, because again, I don’t know for sure, but this rumor’s been out there. There’s a couple of things that I would say to this. I think that if this is true, it makes sense. They were very successful in the transition over to Amazon. They were very successful working internally with Amazon.

Darren Sumner:
You talking about the Expanse guys?

Jenny Stiven:
Yeah, Mark Fergus and those guys. However, it’s not all the same people. So, there is that. Now we’ve got new people in. Some of those people that they’d worked with have left. We’ve got some new people in. So, I’m not sure where that is. Again, it’s like the Brad script. When this transition happened over the past two weeks, obviously this had been talked about for a while. It could quite frankly be that Jen Salke had already been talking to these guys and said, “Hey, heads up, there’s gonna be a lot of structure changes, but we still wanna get your bible, your pitch.” For everybody to know, there’s something called a bible, a look book, and a pitch. Usually, it’s in that order. What it is is that if you’re developing a franchise, you wanna create the bible of what you want that franchise to look like. What are the worlds, what are the characters, what’s the story? Then you would make a look book of what you think that should look like, including who are, sometimes, you don’t always do this, but including who are the actors and actresses that you would love to have be involved with this, or what they should look like.

David Read:
Give you an image.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. As CGI has become so easy, most look books now in presentations will actually have a CGI, AI-created world or lore or world building for it when you’re doing the pitch. The full proposal pitch, if you get past those, you do the bible. “Are you interested?” “Yes.” “Here’s the look book.” “Ooh, this is cool, we wanna see more.” Then you do the full pitch, which would include pilot, usually an extra episode, what’s your arc, what are your beats, how do you see this playing out? Is it a limited series, a full series? What’s it gonna cost? So, after the look book, you have to give your budget. That’s where you start to say, “OK, it’s not The Boys.” You can’t say 10 to 15 million per episode. I don’t think that you can come in with Stargate and say, “We’re gonna do 10 to 15 million per episode.” I don’t know. If Mark Fergus and his partner Hawk are the ones doing it, my guess is they will be close to that 10 million an episode in their pitch.

David Read:
Wow.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s what they’ve done; that’s what they know and they know that’s what makes it look good. That’s what you can really do on a 4K or an 8K with all the right surround sound, this is what you can really do. Even if you don’t have that, it would still look good. I think that there is quite probably something on the table in the works with Mark Fergus; he is the most obvious. The other rumors I’ve heard honestly could be as good and as legitimate and realistic, because they have current contracts with Amazon. There’s one I’ve heard that’s a production company that has a contract with MGM already with one of its shows and Amazon, but they’re not available. There are all of these little variables that have to come into play and I think what we, as fans, have to hope for is that those variables, the logistical variables, don’t become what makes the decision. What makes the decision is, is it a good piece of content, does it do what we wanna see for Stargate, is it in universe? There are lots of things that you can do. Star Wars, whether we like it or not, has been successful in saying 10 years ago, 8 years ago, “OK, everything you’ve read before, all of the other things that were supplemental are legends. They’re not in universe. They’re not in canon.” We all went batshit crazy and said, “Are you kidding?” We were tearing our hair out. I was one of them. I was like, “What the hell?” I had worked with Pablo, who’s head of all creative, and I’m like, “Dude, this was your world. How can you do this?” He’s like, “Be patient. Be patient.” What they did was they started cherry-picking. They said to Dave Filoni, “Who do you like from these different worlds that can fit in this canon that we’ve now said is the real canon?” What they’ve slowly done is they’ve woven in the best, in my opinion.

David Read:
Thrawn.

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

David Read:
Pieces can still fit.

Jenny Stiven:
They can still fit. This was absolutely their 10-year plan. This is not something that happened along the way where they go, “Oh, hey, look, Thrawn fits.” It wasn’t like that. This was a very long arc. What we as fans should hope for is that if they draw a line in the sand and say, “Here are all the things that we’re pulling from Emmerich’s, this is all what we’re pulling from Brad’s, but we’re gonna start over,” what we would hope is that it’s good content. That it’s being made by people we trust to do good sci-fi storytelling. That’s where I am right now. I like Amazon’s choices of who they’ve decided to move. Whether you like Rings of Power or not, the storyline was good. Whether or not the writing and how it was executed was…I’m not really sure why that stumbled, ’cause these are great actors. This is great production. The storyline, I’d follow that storyline anywhere.

David Read:
Haven’t the two producers at the top ever made anything before other than get a nod from JJ Abrams?

Jenny Stiven:
Not big, no, and I think that that shows. Again, that may be why we really want someone like Mark Fergus, who has a proven track record. What I’m hearing from the folks internally in Amazon is international is huge. It’s huge for the TV script and TV franchises. They’ve got strategy that they wanna put in place for these top five franchises. It’s Legally Blonde, Stargate, RoboCop, Rocky and who am I blanking on?

Darren Sumner:
Bond.

Jenny Stiven:
Bond.

David Read:
Pink Panther?

Jenny Stiven:
Bond, but I don’t count Bond. Pink Panther actually is one of the ones that they keep stumbling on. And there’s more. You’ve got Vikings. They’ve got so much. They still have a contract with MTV for Teen Wolf, they wanna remake it. That’s the current news, is that they’re gonna do a remake and a reboot of Teen Wolf. You don’t know. If you’ve got good people who have been there and part of it, it could be an amazingly awesome creative storytelling experience for us as fans.

David Read:
I think the lesson from Origins, if I were to delineate what I’ve read repeatedly over the years since that project had come out and what fans have talked about since then, almost as derisive as Universe is, if you’re not gonna put the appropriate amount of money and energy into this thing, don’t bother. The collective group of Stargate fans, I think, would come down to this, basically saying, “Don’t give me another one if you’re not gonna put your money where your mouth is and properly do it..

Jenny Stiven:
If you’re not gonna be all in. I agree. I do think that Amazon is positioned, to use a very cliched phrase, but it is accurate, is positioned as one of the best, where MGM wasn’t. Quite honestly, guys, MGM wanted to. They were all over doing Brad’s script and they couldn’t get to the finish line. A lot of that was financial. Now you’ve got backing, whomever they may partner with, and again, this comes back to, as fans, we wanna wish for Mark Fergus’ company, JJ Abrams’ company, whoever it is that’s being rumored out there. You wanna be partnered with a production company that has the experience, number one, and the money to bring it over the line.

David Read:
Jenny, is there anything you wanna wrap up and conclude before I bring in the fan questions?

Jenny Stiven:
No, I think I covered all my outline points that I sent. I think I’ve covered everything.

David Read:
Darren, I’m gonna need your input on these as well. A lot of these are for both of you. Jenny, thank you for your analysis and Darren, thank you for your commentary. Dan Ben said, “Can someone explain how that mobile app game is able to do Stargate events, i.e., is it Arcalis?”

Darren Sumner:
Astral Kings.

David Read:
Astral Kings. I haven’t seen anyone else do anything with Stargate. As far as I am aware, I think that’s the first and only crossover that we’ve had in the mythology.

Darren Sumner:
These are four-week integrations. Astral Kings is an existing mobile game in a sci-fi universe. My understanding is they go to MGM and ask for a license. They’ve done it three times now and each time it runs for four weeks and it’s an integration. They bring in Stargate characters and Stargate ships. You can get the Odyssey in your game. You can get Carter in your game. When the promo is over, you get to keep the characters and ships that you’ve earned.

David Read:
‘Cause it’s a digital item.

Darren Sumner:
It’s a way for Astral Kings to go out and promote their product and try and get new users on board using Stargate license.

Jenny Stiven:
And it’s a way for MGM licensing and merchandising to get some quick money on a franchise that they couldn’t get approval for some licensing with the Amazon buy. To this point that I will, as soon as I can, put this in an org chart, Brad Beale is the name of the guy who’s in charge of licensing and merchandising and acquisitions over at Amazon. Chris Ottinger is gonna come in under him. That is an amazing combination because you’ve got someone who’s a huge geek, who loves all of the really cool franchises like Vikings, like Stargate, like RoboCop, and wants to develop new stuff. What this Astral Kings deal did was it was a bridge, essentially. This Astral Kings, and I forget, Time Keepers? That was the other one?

David Read:
Yes.

Jenny Stiven:
These deals were done prior to the buy so they had to be finished out. They could’ve canceled them, but look, it’s a great way, if it didn’t create a lot of problems, it was a great way for Bob Marich, who’s over at MGM in charge of licensing and merchandising right now, to bridge this time. You wanna keep going during this time; you don’t wanna go dormant. It was a great way, and I’m so sorry, I’m blanking on his name. There was a kid who was in charge of interactive games over there. I don’t know if he’s still there. Huge Stargate fan and he’s the one that pushed for this. He’s the one that pushed for both of these. Darren, it was the ones that we wanted to interview, then the sale happened and nobody wanted to talk.

Darren Sumner:
Was this one of the Matts?

Jenny Stiven:
One of the Matts, exactly.

David Read:
I know one of the Matts left.

Jenny Stiven:
One of them left and the other one that stayed, I don’t remember which one left and which one stayed. They were so lovely. I talked to them early on and they were so excited about this and the way to do this crossover. To Dan’s question, the reason you can do it is you have to have everything line up. They had somebody internally who was a Stargate fan who pushed for it. You had somebody internally who thought, “You know what? We need to make some money. This is a great way to do a transition.” Then you had somebody internally, like Carol Mora and a couple of others, who were able to make sure that it stayed in canon across these places. The brilliance of the Astral Kings in any crossover that you do that’s an integration, is that four weeks is short. Usually, it’s a six- to eight-week window when you do these in gaming. A lot of times they’re paid campaigns for a particular project that’s coming out. In this case, what was brilliant about it is they were short, four-week campaigns. You get these digital aspects. You get the integration into the game. You can play with it. Astral Kings gets to reach a new audience. Stargate gets to reach a new audience. MGM gets money.

David Read:
Everyone wins.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s a win-win. If you hadn’t had those people internally to help, it wouldn’t work.

David Read:
Bla bla bla bla. That’s what I heard from both of you.

Jenny Stiven:
Sorry, Darren, you go ahead.

Darren Sumner:
Just like with a show, you’ve gotta have somebody inside MGM pulling for this. How much does Stargate owe to somebody like Charlie Cohen, who’s inside MGM?

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

Darren Sumner:
“This has gotta happen and I’m gonna keep pushing until it’s over the finish line.”

Jenny Stiven:
That’s right.

Darren Sumner:
Same with licensing. Somebody’s gotta not only be willing to take your cheque when you come waving money in MGM’s face, but actually be an advocate for the Stargate brand.

Jenny Stiven:
And understand it.

David Read:
IBREC asks, this dovetails off of the other one, Brice asked. “Is SG Time Keepers’ postponement due to Amazon?” The publisher, Slitherine, and the developer, Creative Forge, created Slitherine Poland, which is now responsible for the development of that game. Where’s that at?

Jenny Stiven:
Money. This is my understanding, and Darren, I know you’ve talked to them as well, but this is the same thing, David, that you and I went through four times with games, is that development money dried up. That wasn’t just because of the Amazon deal, it was also because we lost one of the Matts.

David Read:
So, that’s with them. OK. Got it.

Jenny Stiven:
Then resources internally at MGM, you only have so many people who can do things to get it through.

David Read:
That’s true.

Jenny Stiven:
I think unfortunately that one was a victim of a couple of different things that happened at the same time. I don’t know that it would’ve been back-burnered due to the deal because we knew the deal was coming through when I was there. We knew somebody was gonna buy MGM and that was in March of 2020. The Time Keepers deal happened right after I left. I don’t think that it was just about that. I think unfortunately it was bad timing.

Darren Sumner:
Last thing we heard publicly about Time Keepers was they showed off another level earlier in the year. I think it was maybe January. It was a good while ago. They were talking about potentially having a beta testing in the summer.

David Read:
It looked really good.

Darren Sumner:
These guys have been making strategy PC games for two decades. They know what they’re doing when they get games to market. It fell silent and now it’s December. I tried to contact them recently. I don’t have a comment from them yet about where it is. My speculation was towards the line of maybe licensing and consumer products has to also have its own transition after the Amazon acquisition.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s right and it’s a big restructuring.

Darren Sumner:
I don’t know if it’s got lost. I don’t know if it’s on the back burner or if it needs another pass.

Jenny Stiven:
I don’t either. No, I know. And I did reach out.

Darren Sumner:
It’s hope it hasn’t totally been forgotten. Hopefully it’s not dead.

Jenny Stiven:
Me too. I did reach out, but I haven’t been able to talk to them, that was on me, before our show, about where licensing and merchandising was. I gotta be honest, they probably wouldn’t even have talked to me because they’re in the middle of that restructure. It’s all gonna move under Brad Beale. Chris Ottinger’s coming over, but nothing was mentioned about any of the people, David, that you and I have worked with for years. So, I don’t know how that’s gonna fall out. I think that some projects that were not quite finished in production, or in pre-production, won’t happen. How’s that transfer? These are licenses, so they might let the license go away. Wyvern Gaming is another one. They had a license. They were buying the license for Stargate Atlantis, that’s been put on hold. I think a lot of those happen that way. With Time Keepers it could be something as simple as, “OK, we got through trying to test beta, and now all the restructuring is happening. Guys, we can’t do anything right now.” I don’t know.

Darren Sumner:
I know a lot of Stargate’s licensees have gone through the ringer of MGM’s approval process which is not only for consumer products, but it’s also legal. MGM has earned a bit of a reputation for taking their sweet time to get approvals to their licensees. That’s also in play here. It could be that the game got far enough that it’s now ready to hit some of the approvals process. Meanwhile, everybody at MGM is preoccupied with other things.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s a show I’d like to do with you guys because I think one of the things that I’ve moved into a lot because of fan and development, being in this area, is consumer products, licensing and merchandising and collectibles. I started working for 20th Century Fox Consumer Products back in 2010, I think. It was a simultaneous parallel job with my job that was internally for content creation for Fox. That cross-functionality didn’t happen outside of Fox. Any of the other places I worked, it was not active. David and I had to bang the drum to do cross-functionality at MGM and thank God we had two people with Simon Grady and Michael Brown who believed in it. They literally forced it to happen. I would like to see an e-commerce company with a creative studios shingle. How is Amazon gonna handle that? My gut feeling is that they’re gonna be much more open about cross-functionality conversations. Here’s the perfect example: Bob Chapek at Disney, the first thing he did when he was hired was to stop cross-functionality between the e-commerce division and the creative content divisions and people internally were furious. A lot of the content guys, the teams, were infuriated. The minute Bob Iger came back, he got rid of that. He got rid of the guy that was in charge of e-commerce that Bob Chapek had put there and he recombined those so that you have teams of commerce on content and content on commerce. That would be how I would imagine that Amazon’s gonna do it; that you’re gonna have Brad Beale, who is an Amazon person, who they brought over Chris Oettinger for MGM. You have the person who knows commerce, who knows licensing and merchandising and acquisitions, combined with someone who is a huge geek, who gets content, but who also gets the business side. I don’t know who they’re gonna bring in underneath them. I couldn’t find, probably because they don’t have everybody in place yet. I would be fascinated if Amazon doesn’t do a better job at this than Disney and I will be highly disappointed if they don’t do good cross-functionality between licensing and merchandising, collectibles, consumer products. I would love for us to have a show about that because the one thing that I think the Stargate fans as a whole can agree on is that licensing and merchandising opportunities have been lost over and over and over and over.

David Read:
Hand over fist.

Darren Sumner:
I just did the 2022 holiday gift guide for Stargate. Boy, that made me sad.

Jenny Stiven:
Didn’t it?

David Read:
“This is what we’ve got!”

Darren Sumner:
I started with 2021 and I pulled stuff from that article. OK, the shows are on Blu-ray, that’s great.

David Read:
Got a couple new books.

Darren Sumner:
Eaglemoss, we ended up with three ships and then Eaglemoss went into administration. We’ve had no new novels for three years. We’ve had no new comics for a couple of years. We have all the same stuff we had last year and don’t know what else.

Jenny Stiven:
You’ve got people that are individual licensees or people who are individuals who are flying under the radar ’cause they’re not making enough money on Stargate to care or to flag anybody.

David Read:
T-shirts, anyone?

Jenny Stiven:
I know. I do think that that’s gonna be a problem and that’s why I think it’s a whole show in and of itself. I will say this.

Darren Sumner:
We could go over licensing for two hours.

Jenny Stiven:
I would love that.

Darren Sumner:
The one thing that came back this year was Big Finish. That was not new content.

David Read:
That’s true.

Darren Sumner:
That was a repackaging of the existing audio dramas.

Jenny Stiven:
But at least it was something. I think the biggest question mark, I should say, is gonna be the individuals who wanna make, like RockLove Jewelry and some of those. I think they may be some of the collateral damage that happens because Amazon is not good about its affiliate programs, about its independent sellers. I know that they’ve tried recently to genuinely overhaul that, but I don’t know how that would start to work with integration with its creative studios, with franchise IP.

David Read:
Jenny, a wink and a nod to a certain channel on YouTube. Woodclircock wants to know, “How do we take these channels with anonymous but unverified sources inside of MGM seriously? Or do we consider them clickbait?”

Jenny Stiven:
No, I absolutely take them seriously. Not all of them. Anybody who’s a huge fan who has tried to source people internally, even though they may be third or fourth concentric circle out, watch it and listen to it knowing, “OK, that’s cool. That sounds really interesting.” It could be a rumor that’s true right now that won’t be true two weeks from now. Or it’s a rumor that will develop, which is usually what happens. It’s like this Mark Fergus rumor. Like I said, I had heard it before. Then SciTrek got a source who says that they’ve seen the bible. OK, cool. Awesome. I would love that to be true, frankly. Now what I’ve heard from that is it’s actually slightly different. So, I think what we do is you watch that as a fan and you think, “OK, cool. That sounds amazing,” or, “Oh my God, I hope that doesn’t happen.” You take into consideration that everybody has anonymous sources. Darren and I for years have had to play that where I’ve been an anonymous source for him on background information. Everybody uses that in journalism. In any kind of YouTube channel, Get in the Gate, all these guys, everybody has different sources. David’s got super deep sources on the talent side. He’s got super deep sources on the showrunner and writer side.

David Read:
And I’m not telling.

Jenny Stiven:
He’ll say, “Hey,” and what you’ve seen with David and what Darren do, is they come at it obliquely where they say, “OK, that’s background information, but now I’m gonna ask a question that basically takes that information and I’m gonna ask this person who may know more and therefore that can verify this background information.”

David Read:
Separately.

Jenny Stiven:
And that’s separate.

Darren Sumner:
Or we don’t have a source on the record, but having something in the background can allow us to shape how we talk about something on a podcast or a live stream or maybe shape an opinion piece where we say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if this kind of approach was taken.”

Jenny Stiven:
I think what you do is you listen to all of this and if it’s corroborated by a couple of different places you go, “Oh, cool. We’ve come in our concentric circles.” I think you pay attention to it and you listen to it. If someone seems to have consistent sources that some of those rumors come true, then I would say, pay attention to it and absorb that as a fan.

Darren Sumner:
The proof is in the pudding.

Jenny Stiven:
I found it weird that one of the other YouTube channels accused the SciTrek guy of lying and I thought that was really awful. Any of these people who are genuinely fans who are doing this and they’re doing it because they love sci-fi, they love Stargate, cool. The more the merrier, guys.

David Read:
You can’t assume they’re doing it for clicks.

Jenny Stiven:
You guys all know David because he’s put himself out there for years. You all know Darren because he’s been at all the conventions. But some of these new guys, they didn’t have time to be out there for you to know their face, to meet them, especially during COVID. I don’t know that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think as fans, do your own research. The research that I did, there’s so much information available if you go search on literally Deadline or Hollywood Reporter or MovieWeb or Comic Book Resources. These guys have a lot of information. What you do is compare and it literally can take you an hour. You look at, OK, what’s the one thing that they all said? OK, then that one’s probably pretty true. That corroborates what you’re seeing. Then as a fan, enjoy it. My God, if someone’s out there saying really cool stuff, you can be like, “Oh my God, that would be available,” or, “Oh, holy crap, that would be awful.” Cool, then comment about it. Get into a conversation. All of that is good because it means that we’re out there, we’re talking about it. That means Amazon sees that David has over 20,000, SciTrek has 14,000, Get In The Gate has something else.

David Read:
GateWorld’s almost 100,000.

Jenny Stiven:
GateWorld’s at 100,000? Holy crap.

Darren Sumner:
This month.

Jenny Stiven:
The Companion has 7,000. All of these are not overlaps because people look at different things for different information.

David Read:
In different ways.

Jenny Stiven:
I say enjoy it. If it gets corroborated, great. I doubt seriously that most of these people are doing anything other than really being genuine fans. If they’re repeating a rumor or have gotten a rumor or have gotten information, then that’s true at that moment. That person was in a marketing meeting. Remember what I said earlier, a marketing meeting is siloed. They don’t necessarily have the showrunners coming in and talking to them or the head of scripted development. They’re given the marching orders, essentially. If your source is at the marketing level, that’s genuinely true for that marketing department, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what’s happening in scripted development. It means, “Hey, heads up, you might wanna have this on your back burner.” We used to get those all the time. “Hey, there’s gonna be three Vikings shows, a prequel, a branch-off on the son and a sequel.”

David Read:
It’s like The Walking Dead.

Jenny Stiven:
We had to be ready for those. That’s my answer and other people may feel differently.

Darren Sumner:
You gotta be ready and three out of four of them don’t come to pass.

David Read:
Darren had that hot-take article that they should greenlight three shows simultaneously. Raj Luthra asked here, “If they could continue SGA and SGU where they left off, wouldn’t doing animation be better?” If we follow Darren’s hot-take logic, if they could greenlight more than one show, that would be how I would do it.

Darren Sumner:
I think that was my third pitch.

Jenny Stiven:
I loved that article, Darren.

Darren Sumner:
Obviously, you guys know me. That came out of my frustration of sitting around waiting for so long and having nothing. It’s an attempt to express to MGM and Amazon that their fan base is here and their fan base needs to be taken seriously, obviously. I’ll add to the previous conversation. You guys know I came from a journalism background. Journalism training, so GateWorld has always been sourced. It needs to be sourced or we’re not gonna publish it. Rumor sites and rumor channels are part of fandom. The stuff can be fun to watch. Genuinely, like you say, it’s entertainment. But I hope people understand it for what it is, which is rumors. Often, it’s single-source. It’s somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. So, take it for what it is. It doesn’t always come to pass and it’s not always true. If it’s information or entertainment, it’s a different kind of information than what you’re getting from Variety or Deadline.

Jenny Stiven:
I just thought of this. Part of this also is if you go back to the marketing department. Each of these departments are asked and tasked to do different things for these franchises. All of this is put in the pot to the decision makers. When I was at MGM, I had to do four different proposals for Stargate Command, what was going to happen next.

David Read:
I remember that.

Jenny Stiven:
I had to do one for all different types of goals. Chris Ottinger’s was the biggest. He wanted to know, what are we gonna do for distribution? Will we use YouTube? Remember, three years ago, not everything had monetized yet. For that kind of thing, you do a pitch, essentially, a proposal. I hired a company to make my deck look pretty. I know that one of the rumors that was out there came from SciTrek’s site. That’s completely legitimate. That’s a legitimate source. They are giving you something that is accurate because they made a deck for a pitch for Fergus for it to go, or Bad Robot, to go over to Amazon.

Darren Sumner:
It was lack of context

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly.

Darren Sumner:
Or something else in the rumor is wrong.

Jenny Stiven:
I think they’ve all gotten very careful now about saying, “Hey, this is one source of a source, and this is what I’ve got.” It’s, “This is rumor,” or, “This is just somebody’s opinion.” AI think people have gotten a lot better, I’ve noticed, on a lot of the sites to say that as qualification. The context here still leaves that rumor legitimate, and that context is Amazon’s sci-fi fantasy silo asked for pitches from production companies. OK, that’s the context. That doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. It is a legitimate rumor. It isn’t sourced beyond that. I think to your point, Darren, that’s what the difference is, that they’re true. It happened. The context is that we don’t know what happens next. It was true in that moment, that happened, it’s fascinating. We could go in depth about whether or not we want Bad Robot to be part of this, but it doesn’t necessarily do anything for the long game and Amazon plays the long game.

Darren Sumner:
It gets everybody worked up.

Jenny Stiven:
Even Deadline reports rumors. The Wrap reports rumors and they’ll qualify it as rumors. They are considered journalism sites for entertainment. I read them every day in the morning; it’s the first thing I do. You have to absorb it and then you wait and see. That’s what I will always tell fans: “Cool rumor. Cool information. I love this stuff.” I will watch all of the channels. I love all of it. I am a gossip hound for this stuff, but I don’t take it to the bank.

David Read:
It only has a certain amount of weight that comes with where it came from and that’s it. You can’t sit and let it sink your boat.

Darren Sumner:
The lack of discernment among the audience is a challenge to me as a content creator then because folks aren’t discerning about the type of information that it is that they’re digesting.

David Read:
Often not.

Darren Sumner:
Folks will come on our channels and say, “This thing that you said is wrong or is outdated because Rian Johnson got a green light to make a $200 million Stargate movie.”

David Read:
And they will die by that.

Darren Sumner:
And no, he didn’t. It’s a rumor that we heard, and for all we know, maybe Rian Johnson was in the office pitching the movie and got a really good…

Jenny Stiven:
You know how those meetings go.

Darren Sumner:
Who knows?

Jenny Stiven:
These meetings are the best. It’ll be Rian Johnson came into Amazon because Amazon saw Knives Out and said, “Oh, you know what? We wanna do something else and we are having all these pitches that are done on procedurals and mysteries and thrillers,” ’cause it’s not just sci-fi. “Oh my God, let’s get Rian Johnson in here.” Rian Johnson comes in and says, “Oh my God, you guys got MGM. Do you guys know how much I love RoboCop?” They say, “Oh, but what about Stargate?” From there, “ba-da-la-la-la.” Everybody’s off and running. Here’s the only thing I would say to both of you about the audiences: You guys and I know that most of the people who have the negative comments are not the majority percentage of your audience. I’m not in any manner, shape, or form criticizing. I’m obviously criticizing trolls, people who are being negative to be negative or to criticize or to be assholes about things. The people in the fandom, I genuinely believe after all these years and all the fandoms that I’ve worked, usually those are the minorities. Unfortunately, like reviews, the only people that leave comments are the ones who are over the top excited or under the bottom pissed.

David Read:
The most passionate. They’re at the tailing ends of the bell curve.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s not that chunk in the middle.

David Read:
It’s not the normies.

Jenny Stiven:
I genuinely believe, guys, that the majority of your audiences, especially you two, are extremely discerning Stargate fans. I genuinely believe from all of the comments of being at Gatecon, being overseas at the two UK Cons, having worked with the people in Germany and Australia, these are pretty smart fans who know and might get excited about the rumors. They know the bottom line. It’s like, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, is this true? Ugh.” That’s your normal fan right now. Honestly, I think the majority of Stargate fans are pretty cynical, which is unfortunate. I think that they have every right to be, so I think that they take all of this with an ocean of salt on all of the sites, whether it’s us talking right now, and everybody should take everything that I say with an ocean of salt. It’s based on my experience; it’s based on my research. There are 40 different points of view to what I talked about today and the people that I talk to internally have people opposite of them internally who might have different perceptions of how this is happening. Those can both be true at the same time. I think, what I want all of our fans to know: All these things can be true at the same time. It’s a wait and see.

Darren Sumner:
No, I’m glad you’re saying it. It’s if your source works for somebody who works for somebody who works inside Mark Burnett’s office, then the reason that MGM doesn’t wanna have anything to do with Stargate.

Jenny Stiven:
For years I could never say that. I couldn’t even outwardly say it because I was an MGM employee. Even though I was a consultant, I’m still an employee, and also ethically I would never have felt comfortable saying that.

David Read:
We have NDAs. There is a process that has to move forward on its own, unencumbered by us.

Jenny Stiven:
And might have all expired.

Darren Sumner:
Context is king.

Jenny Stiven:
Context. Look, it’s the same thing that we talk about with Facebook, with Twitter, the hell show that’s Twitter right now. Wherever we are on social, any of us can post an article and have a one-liner and we so often assume that our audience who reads that is gonna automatically understand where we were coming from.

David Read:
In the precise context in which we said it.

Jenny Stiven:
And they never do.

David Read:
And that almost never happens.

Jenny Stiven:
Never. You have to give context of where you’re coming from, what your point of view was. Then if people wanna disagree with you, fine, whatever, but you can’t get mad at people who make the wrong assumption because all you did was a one-liner posting this article about what you think is happening. It’s so ironic: If we post it, we get mad, but then if someone else posts it, we get mad. We want it both ways. We wanna be able to have that opinion, post our opinion, have everything-

David Read:
Why can’t you understand me? I understand me so well.

Jenny Stiven:
I know. Look, I am the worst, as these guys know. I don’t need you to agree with me, but damn it, acknowledge my point. I am the worst at that in an argument. I think that one of the things that I learned with COVID is all of these things can be true. They all can be true. It doesn’t mean that I want all of these things to be true, but I know I say this every time, it is a wait-and-see game in this industry. Our job as fans is to do exactly what everybody’s doing, what Companion’s doing, 30 Days of Stargate over on Reddit. David is doing amazing interviews every weekend. Wormhole X-treme! with rewatches and Darren is doing kick-ass articles and in-depth databases. Then we’ve got people like SciTrek and Get In The Gate and 3 Fries Short podcast. TikToks like Rebecca Davis and Athena Tano, who does TikToks every day about Stargate. These people who are doing that kind of content that keeps it alive, that’s our job. Our job is to keep saying, “You bet. I’m up for it. Let’s do it.” We may not want this description over here or this pitch, but ultimately, it’s our job as fans to say, “We’re here. We want it. Please, please pay attention to us. We are loud. We are gonna buy it. We will spend money. We are here to do this.” I think that We Want Stargate group, that Kirstie and those guys are amazing because they are constantly there every single day doing this.

David Read:
I’ve got a couple more questions. Let’s move through them a little bit more quickly and then we’ll be done. Sommer, “Jenny, do you think you will be involved in the next series in some way? Will you try to be? I know the super fans would love to see you there if they can’t be.”

Jenny Stiven:
Well, bless you. A couple things. My career has changed slightly since I was with Stargate Command and MGM, so my focus now is I consult for IPs and fandoms specifically about their franchises and how to develop fandom audiences and how to get fandoms and then also how to build relationships with those fandoms. That certainly would be applicable here, but Amazon is a massive beast. To work within Amazon, I would have to go through an application process for a full-time job, which I don’t wanna do. I’ve been there. I’ve talked with people over there. I don’t want a full-time job.

Darren Sumner:
They don’t use third-party consultants for the work?

Jenny Stiven:
To be a consultant with Amazon, you have to work through one of their agencies, as of right now. They don’t hire consultants directly, I don’t know if that’s gonna change. To be fair, my name is a little mud because it’s with Stargate Command that failed. That’s fine. I totally understand. That’s the business. That’s how it works. I’m not sure that the people that went from MGM over to Amazon might not bring me up because that connection would be one that you wanna distance yourself from. That was then. This is brand new. I would understand if that was the case.

Darren Sumner:
You want us to hashtag you? We can hashtag it.

Jenny Stiven:
Pardon me?

Darren Sumner:
You want us to hashtag it? We can hashtag Jenny.

Jenny Stiven:
No. Please, please, look, I will answer the second part. I would love to work on Stargate forever. Wherever it goes, whatever it does, I am always gonna be the one that raises my hand. To answer the second part of that question, I will raise my hand. I will definitely offer. But the first part of that question, no, I don’t think that they would necessarily come to me off the bat because I think that that connection to the old, they’re done with. However, having said that, I think that it’s quite probable that they would come to experts like David and Darren and others and say, “Would you like to come on board as a consultant because you are experts in the canon?” Depending on what they do for content, I think if the content…

David Read:
Depending on which way they go.

Jenny Stiven:
… if the content is very different, then no, I think all of us will be thanked and acknowledged.

David Read:
Legends

Jenny Stiven:
Exactly. I think we will be legends.

Darren Sumner:
You’re already a legend, Dave.

Jenny Stiven:
I will raise my hand. You guys know me; I’m never shy about raising my hand to work.

David Read:
Absolutely. It’d be a missed opportunity and nothing is sadder than a missed opportunity if you didn’t.

Jenny Stiven:
I appreciate that

David Read:
You never really get over that. I think you should go for it. Mama Nox, Erika, “What do we, the public Gaters, need to do to help? Lots of us still keep up to date with SG Pages, events, Dial the Gate, Companion. Is there anything else we can do at this stage?” Final thoughts.

Jenny Stiven:
I think, honestly — and this is no offense to Brad — but to narrow our focus on We Want Stargate. I’ve noticed some of the We Want Stargates and some of the others have narrowed that focus a bit. It’s not just about the Brad Wright canon and universe. I think we separate those two things out a little bit now and I think what we do is we focus on supporting GateWorld, supporting SciTrek, supporting any of these that are gathering followers. Supporting Dial the Gate, who brings in so much talent and showrunners and writers, I think, is really huge. I think honestly the best thing you can do is get in new people. That is the number-one thing that I am asked right now about sci-fi is, “OK, cool, for this franchise, for this IP, we’ve got our core. It’s called your core audience.” We want that next concentric circle out, which would be sci-fi that are overlapped with Stargate. The third concentric circle out would be things like mainstream sci-fi gamers. That’s what I think genuinely you need to do as a fan right now is expand our audience. We need to expand that fan base. Tell people about Dial the Gate, tell people about GateWorld. Tell them that this is not just news about what’s happening or not happening, that there’s amazing content to be had. Tell them about The Companion, about SciTrek. Whomever you think is worth following, you need to expand that base beyond our core audience. That’s honestly, I know one of the first questions that will be asked at the table is, “OK, cool, this is great and we love what you’re doing, but where are we gonna get new audiences from?”

David Read:
Who knows whom?

Darren Sumner:
I imagine the performance of the shows on Prime Video is gonna be a huge part of that equation when it gets people sitting down at the table. Is it significant that we continue to encourage new viewers to go and watch the show on Prime video?

Jenny Stiven:
Oh my God, yes. Absolutely. That’s a given. Sorry, I should have said that right out of the gate, Darren. That’s spot on. You always get me on the business ones.

Darren Sumner:
We know that they’re looking for data. So, think about where Amazon executives are gonna go to find data.

Jenny Stiven:
That’s where they’re gonna look. Absolutely, you’re spot on. My default for fandom is always to look at where fans are out doing their own stuff. Stargate TikTok is insane. I don’t know if you guys have looked at it.

David Read:
Really?

Jenny Stiven:
Oh my God, it is insane. It is phenomenally creative. If you wanna look at an example that grew its audience, the overlap with cosplayers and gamers is huge on TikTok. There are people that we didn’t even know existed that were out there, and have been out there, but now have used TikTok. To that end, I’m not sure that people are pushing to watch it on Amazon. Darren, you’re spot on because they will definitely look at the social and the platforms and the fans and your guys’ channels. But their absolute bible is gonna be their own data.

David Read:
Interesting. I gotta tell you guys, I had my 20th high school reunion a few months ago. Shout out to Jay Francois, who was my classmate in kindergarten. He went to a Catholic school and I went to public school. Long of the short, I hadn’t seen him since kindergarten. He found Stargate a few months ago and was around Season Two watching it and found out my involvement with the franchise as a reporter. He’s now on Season Nine. He’s dived headfirst into the franchise and he loves it.

Jenny Stiven:
I love that.

David Read:
This guy’s my age; this guy’s almost 40. You never know who’s out there who’s gonna fall in love with the franchise. You never know. He was watching my show and he said, “I watched your episode with Teryl Rothery. I’m stopping until I finish watching the Stargate content then I’ll watch your Dial the Gate. I don’t wanna get spoiled anymore.” ‘Cause he hadn’t seen Heroes yet.

Jenny Stiven:
Geez. Lord.

David Read:
Boy. Isn’t that funny?

Jenny Stiven:
But that’s true. You don’t know what the amount of reach that you guys have, what you can do by saying, “Guys, look, we need to stop looking at them as adversaries.” Which I don’t know necessarily that we were as a group, but there is that feeling of us versus them. Unfortunately, because of who MGM was, that ended up being that way a lot. This is brand-new day for every single one of these people. For Chris Brearton, for Chris Ottinger, for Michael Wright, it’s a brand-new day walking in there. I don’t know if Stargate is gonna be what they pull out of their hip first, but for us as fans it’s a brand-new day. Let’s look at Amazon as a partner, as opposed to an adversary. Let’s look at MGM as part of Amazon, who’s there, and who has said, and it hasn’t been bullshit. David and I have been there in meetings with execs that are on the board saying, “Stargate was our top-three strategy for IP franchises,” period. This was in 2017.

David Read:
Jewel in the crown.

Jenny Stiven:
Whether or not it happened was because of a variety of variables that we couldn’t control. It doesn’t change the fact that the intent was there and Amazon has that same intention. Let’s look at them as brand-new day, brand-new partner. We have people coming from MGM that we know for a fact have supported Stargate in the past. It’s part of the strategic franchises that they wanna do. OK, then let’s support the people that would make those decisions. To Darren’s point, watch it on Amazon. I will have it on in the background during the day. I already do, ’cause it’s fun for me to have that. I have to have white noise when I work, so I turn it on in the background knowing that that’s being tracked. OK, cool. I should have been recommending that to people. “Hey, I’ve got other friends that do that,” that have never seen it.

David Read:
Is it still showing up as a channel that you can watch on one of the top devices? What was it called?

Jenny Stiven:
What was it?

David Read:
Was it Sling?

Jenny Stiven:
I can’t remember.

David Read:
Was it Sling?

Jenny Stiven:
I think it was Sling, but I don’t know. I didn’t look that up. I should have, because that’s important to know where else is it. Darren, I know you do this quarterly, is where is it that you can find it and what are those streamers as well as OTTs. I know Roku has it on several channels.

David Read:
Good

Darren Sumner:
SG-1 just left Netflix in the US this past week. My radar is up next to see if the Hulu deal for Atlantis is gonna be allowed to lapse.

David Read:
I don’t know how you keep up with the “where do I watch?” I would’ve deleted that page, Darren, a long time ago.

Darren Sumner:
Once a month I go and check everybody and every once in a while, somebody will beat me and they’ll post it on Reddit and they’ll say, “Hey, there’s a flag up on Hulu that says this show’s leaving in two weeks.”

David Read:
Wow.

Jenny Stiven:
We get the countdown. I don’t know, this time could be the time that Hulu says, especially because of who they’re owned by now. Honestly, that’s incredibly convoluted. I don’t know how Chris Ottinger kept track of it, because that was a nightmare. Kyla, I don’t know how they did it.

David Read:
Excel

Jenny Stiven:
I would’ve killed somebody. I couldn’t handle it. It was insane. I would’ve walked. That would not be my job ever.

David Read:
No.

Jenny Stiven:
The spreadsheets are nuts. So, I don’t know. Some of the things that I was surprised at was the Australia deal that was renewed, that was renewed in 2022, earlier this year. I was surprised, “Really? You’re gonna renew that?”

David Read:
They have data.

Jenny Stiven:
I thought you’d let everything lapse and then start over. But of course not, ’cause of what you guys have said, which is they’ve got the data and if they see it succeeding and they’re making money on the backside out of a percentage…

David Read:
Then why not?

Jenny Stiven:
They literally don’t have to do anything.

David Read:
Deal with the rest later.

Darren Sumner:
We don’t know if those deals are exclusive.

Jenny Stiven:
And they don’t have to do the marketing. I know that they’re looking at a Twitch deal for content, so there’s all kinds of distributors. David, you and I did that Twitch deal for Atlantis. That was extremely popular. Nothing came of it because it was during the transition. You don’t know where things are gonna be and what they’re gonna let go and what contracts they’re gonna let lapse.

David Read:
That’s it. As fans, you can, of course, if you want to, “it’s Brad or bust,” or “I’m not interested.” Then, what could have been, if you would’ve watched this other thing, they would’ve later come back and said, “OK, so this thing in the midtime that was of a quality product. All right. It was successful. Brad, what else you got? Maybe we can weave things in.” Don’t shut off your opportunities.

Jenny Stiven:
Ironically, Origins, as much as it wasn’t what we wanted to be, made over a million dollars. For something that was not expected to do that well…

David Read:
Didn’t it premiere on top on iTunes or something? Something crazy.

Jenny Stiven:
Yeah, it did. It was insane. It was on the OTT list for about three months. I think, again, proof in the pudding that the fans will go for anything. I do think that we’re lucky in that while a lot of us are, “Oh man, we want this to be in the Brad Wright’s universe.” We aren’t averse to Stargate content if it can be done. I’m hoping, I’m really hoping that the labyrinthine approval process of what Wyvern Gaming had to go through will be cleared the decks. If that can happen, it’s much more straightforward for licensees, for people pitching, then that means we’ll get more content. Maybe we’ll get something in Roland Emmerich’s universe and in Brad’s, and something new. I have no idea. I know those have all been pitched. Roland, I think, is done. But who knows? Look, you have all new people. Roland could see this and go, “Hey, I could come pitch.”

David Read:
What’s going on?

Jenny Stiven:
“I have this trilogy idea.” His first movie, I saw the script. I loved it. It was amazing and it allowed for Brad’s universe to exist. Hats off to Scripted Television over at MGM, they were the ones that made that happen. You never know. It could be something really cool like that that kick-starts it all off and then Amazon says, “Hey guys, stick with us for five years and we’re gonna make this happen. This is how it’s gonna arc.” I know that’s what they’re talking about, I just don’t know what it’s gonna be.

David Read:
Keep the opportunities open for yourselves; don’t cut yourselves out of the picture too quickly.

Darren Sumner:
It was a cathartic experience to me to read Brad’s tweets and get a little bit of his perspective on this. As much as fans have been frustrated over the last two years, imagine how Brad’s been coping with the ins and outs, the ups and downs and the indecision. He basically started talking about his pitch in the past tense and saying, “I did this. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. It would’ve been fun.” That’s given me a bit of a cathartic ability to let it go.

Jenny Stiven:
I hear you on that one. It’s not that I wouldn’t hold out hope for Brad to be involved, like you said earlier. To both of your points, he could be involved in some way and that goes back to the point we made that that was the equation then. The equation now is different. Don’t bemoan that. It’s not MGM’s fault, it’s not Brad’s fault, it’s not Amazon’s fault. That script was made for the group that was available then. It isn’t apropos, quite frankly, to what the strategic plan and tactical resources are at Amazon now.

Darren Sumner:
But we know things come back around. Thrawn is pulled back into the Star Wars canon. We thought for years that JJ’s movies were everything that was gonna be Star Trek from now on and what’s happened for the last five years is they’ve cycled this back around and integrated multiple timelines and multiple realities as part of their Star Trek universe.

David Read:
We can argue that, but they’ve tried. Tried being the operative word.

Jenny Stiven:
And whether you liked it or not.

Darren Sumner:
Whatever you think creatively of JJ…

Jenny Stiven:
It exists.

Darren Sumner:
Discovery, aside from whether you liked it or not, it’s come back around.

David Read:
This is true.

Darren Sumner:
Stargate could do something very different next and then in five years come back around to something else. It’s a bigger media landscape and maybe Brad’s doing something over here.

David Read:
It’s still gotta have a Stargate in it. We’ve made that argument. We are franchise fans. We being him and I, and you, Jenny, of course. All right, folks. Wow. That’s a lot to digest and assimilate. What do you say we do this all again June or May?

Jenny Stiven:
Yeah.

David Read:
See where we’re at.

Jenny Stiven:
I think we’re gonna wanna do it after January 15th.

David Read:
Really? OK.

Jenny Stiven:
MGM+. I think they’re gonna make some more strategic franchise announcements. Whether or not Stargate’s announced as part of that, I think, will be a clue for us about whether or not that’s gonna happen now or later. Again, going back to your very first question, I’m gonna be fascinated to see what Michael Wright does with MGM+ and what his announcements are. If they’re quiet, which, look, it’s the holidays, but Amazon has been known to work right through the holidays.

David Read:
That’s true.

Jenny Stiven:
I’d be interested to see what they do in the launch of MGM+, what announcements they make at that time.

David Read:
They’ve gotta come out swinging.

Jenny Stiven:
I know.

David Read:
They’ve gotta with two or three big titles. You have to. This space is so frigging cluttered.

Jenny Stiven:
I know.

David Read:
Apple+, Disney+, Peacock. People only have so much cash to spare in their wallets.

Jenny Stiven:
And time to watch.

David Read:
That’s true too. I can’t watch everything.

Darren Sumner:
I’m never gonna be caught up on all the shows on my list.

David Read:
That’s exactly right.

Jenny Stiven:
I’m sure this’ll come as a shock, I have a spreadsheet and I’ve got all of the shows that I wanna watch on it. I keep adding to it and it’s ridiculous. I started categorizing them by not what channels they were on or streamers they were on or how I would find them, but by genre that I like. ‘Cause then what I do is I go on, I’m like, “Oh, what am I in the mood for?”

David Read:
That’s true.

Jenny Stiven:
Then I can go find something. Honestly, I think we’re gonna hear something. I don’t know. It could be that they go quiet and dormant because they’re gonna go work on it. Or they’re gonna come out swinging January 15th and say, “We have Legally Blonde, RoboCop, Stargate.”

David Read:
Good.

Jenny Stiven:
I don’t know.

David Read:
We’ll have to see what happens.

Darren Sumner:
I asked you this question last time, I think, Jenny, but let me ask it again in the context of this new world that you’ve described to us, which is: Would an Amazon or an MGM or an MGM+ potentially come out and make an announcement that is a development announcement before a green light?

Jenny Stiven:
Sure.

Darren Sumner:
Rather than saying, “Hey, we’re gonna make a new Stargate show, 10 episodes. Here’s the producer.”

Jenny Stiven:
They’ve been known to do it.

Darren Sumner:
“We’re actively working on something?”

Jenny Stiven:
They did that for Rings of Power and some would say that that was successful and some would say that that was the dumbest thing they’d ever done. Because what it led a lot of people to believe was that it was gonna actually be directed by Peter Jackson. What they said was it was gonna be in the world of Peter Jackson. You had a lot of misunderstandings with that announcement and they had to clarify that quite a bit. Development announcements are made all the time. Everybody, I’m gonna say again, read Deadline, read The Wrap. Variety gets things second, thirdhand. I don’t know about them. I would say Deadline and The Wrap, they’re the ones that report on the things that they’re hearing. Some of them are rumors, but they won’t report it, or they’ll say it’s a rumor. That’s where you’d see something in development, under their TV or film silo on their sites. Darren, you’ve got contacts. I think what’s gonna happen is that we’re gonna hear from some of our friends at Amazon and they’re gonna say, “Hey, a development deal is in the works…” I’m hearing that now, that there’s a development deal in the works, but it can’t be closed because of a variety of different issues. I don’t know if that’s accurate. It’s bandied about. It could be that they’ve already been working behind the scenes. This announcement that’s been made, and this is usually what happens with some of the big corporations with its acquisitions, they’ve made this structural and re-structural announcement in how MGM’s gonna be woven and they’ve already been working in the background developing the sci-fi fantasy procedural and mystery thrillers that they wanna do. Taking a meeting with Rian Johnson, we know that happened. What they discussed, whatever. I think they could come out January 15th and say, “Here’s what’s on MGM+, what’s gonna happen right now, and here’s what’s in development that you’ll see either on Prime Video or on MGM+.” It depends on, I think, two things: what their PR comms people tell them and what the data tells them. Shows like this, people like you guys and what you’re doing weekly, The Companion, SciTrek, talking every week about it, it may be that they see this and their data of who’s watching Stargate on Amazon Prime and they’ll say, “You know what? We need to make a development announcement. People are waiting.” They do look at that. Their comms people look at that every day and then they have huge arguments in the marketing meeting with the research people and the marketers who say, “We have no content, no assets. We can’t do anything.” It depends on how those conversations go. My favorite one always, as being part of the content production and marketing content team, which is where I’ve always been, was, “OK, we’re gonna make this announcement.” “OK, do you have assets?” “No.” “Can’t you make a logo in two days?” “No, we can’t, unless you have a lot of money.” That’s when we get the buck ninety-nine cup of joe, “This is what we got. What can you do for this?” That’s not Amazon. Amazon could turn it around; they’ve got internal people. John Zaffarano, who we know from way back, he’s in charge of their internal AV department. He does all the trailers, he does all of the coming, all the development. He does all of that content. He does the clip shows, all of that. If they tell him, “Hey, this is coming up,” the first thing he’s gonna say is, “And what am I using for content? Where are my assets?” The announcement could be killed based on not having assets. All of the fun details.

David Read:
Real quick, Jenny, what are you watching right now?

Jenny Stiven:
I’m in a whole thing of procedurals and stuff like that, so I’m binging Equalizer, Fire Country. I’m also watching The Peripheral, which is phenomenal. I started Wednesday over on Netflix, which I love.

David Read:
Is it good?

Jenny Stiven:
Shoot, what was the other thing I started on Amazon? The Peripheral, but there was another one too that was really good. I’m blanking.

David Read:
You’re doing all those simultaneously?

Jenny Stiven:
Hanna. It depends on what I’m in the mood for.

David Read:
Hanna, you said?

Jenny Stiven:
Hanna. It’s been on for a while, but it’s amazing.

David Read:
Darren?

Darren Sumner:
What am I watching right now? My family was out of town for a while, so I decided to catch up on a bunch of movies and I realized I stopped watching movies before the pandemic.

Jenny Stiven:
I know.

Darren Sumner:
I re-watched Blade Runner so that I can finally watch Blade Runner 2049.

Jenny Stiven:
Cool.

David Read:
Did you like it?

Darren Sumner:
Yeah, I liked it a lot.

David Read:
I think it improves on the original.

Jenny Stiven:
I do too.

Darren Sumner:
I watched Dune for the first time and the second one.

David Read:
It’s a good movie.

Darren Sumner:
All my sci-fi friends told me that the third season of The Orville is exceptional television. I’ve been holding onto it and I have one episode left. Let me tell you, that is a stellar show in Season Three.

Jenny Stiven:
I have not finished it.

David Read:
What’d you think of Domino?

Jenny Stiven:
I’m sorry, that’s one of the other ones. I started and I haven’t finished the third season.

David Read:
Domino is good.

Darren Sumner:
Unbelievably good.

Jenny Stiven:
I’m not as big a Star Trek fan as you guys, so I should include this, I am simultaneously catching up on Discovery, New Worlds, Prodigy and Lower Decks. I don’t always watch them when you guys… and also because I wanna see, is it gonna get picked up.

David Read:
That’s true too

Jenny Stiven:
I don’t bother if it’s a one-season cliffhanger. “Well, that’s nice. I’m sure it was a great story.”

David Read:
Season Three of The Orville is excellent television. The final episode is: If they don’t do another season, I’m OK with it because of how it ends. The final episode of Orville is a “this is why we do sci-fi, this is why we love sci-fi” episode.

Jenny Stiven:
I gotta make sure to push that up on my list.

David Read:
I just watched 1899. I inhaled it in about four days. I’ve been watching the development of this show since they first announced it because they’re using the volume heavily. I loved it.

Jenny Stiven:
Did you?

David Read:
100%. My favorite show of all time is a mystery box show, Lost. It’s very much that. There’ll be three seasons, around eight episodes each. It ends at a very nice act-one finish and you go through it going, “Wow, this is a mind bender.” Then you get near the end of it and it’s, “OK, this is nicely parked for a year and a half.”

Jenny Stiven:
I can’t wait.

Darren Sumner:
That one and The Peripheral I’ve been eyeing and thinking maybe when the season is…

Jenny Stiven:
I loved The Peripheral.

David Read:
I started Andor tonight. Andor will be my next one ’cause they finished it.

Darren Sumner:
I just finished Andor last night.

David Read:
Did you finish Andor last night?

Darren Sumner:
Just last night I watched the last one.

Jenny Stiven:
We finished it on last Wednesday.

Darren Sumner:
It aired last Wednesday. I watched it last night.

David Read:
And you’re happy with it?

Darren Sumner:
Another one of those they parked Season One in a really nice spot.

Jenny Stiven:
I agree.

Darren Sumner:
It’s deeply satisfying. Nobody’s told Star Wars stories like this before.

Jenny Stiven:
It is absolutely beautifully written and it isn’t one of those things, like Rings of Power, you have a tendency to look at the writing, the acting and the production value separately. Andor, I didn’t look at those separately. I was immersed. The writing, the acting, you’re immersed.

David Read:
You don’t have time to. You’re enjoying the process.

Darren Sumner:
The world is so lived in.

Jenny Stiven:
Also, Tales of the Jedi are really good.

David Read:
I’ve heard it’s good.

Jenny Stiven:
Really good.

David Read:
I’ve heard it’s really good.

Jenny Stiven:
Really good. Especially if you like to get the gaps filled in Rebels and Clone Wars.

Darren Sumner:
I’m glad that they’re doing an anthology series, ’cause Tales is really good.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s really good. Visions was gorgeous. Oh my God.

Darren Sumner:
If you’re a droid fan, Andor, they did a sequence with a droid late in the season, no spoilers. but I was welling up. They made me love droids.

Jenny Stiven:
There’s a great podcast, if you guys aren’t listening to it, by Laura Kelly, about Star Wars, and she does a great assessment. I’m blanking on what the name of her podcast was.

David Read:
Laura Kelly?

Jenny Stiven:
Laura Kelly and I’m completely blanking.

David Read:
Shut Up and Take It?

Jenny Stiven:
That’s her, but I forget what her podcast is.

David Read:
Force Toast.

Jenny Stiven:
Force Toast. She and her co-hosts talked about the emotional development of droids and how they’ve been handled in the different movies and television shows. It was so beautiful. It’s such a great assessment and analyzation, so if you guys get a chance, it’s part of the Andor assessment review.

Darren Sumner:
I would listen to the hell out of that.

Jenny Stiven:
It’s really interesting. Then, for you two especially, check out Visions.

David Read:
I wanna see Visions.

Jenny Stiven:
Anybody who’s creative in our audience who’s into Star Wars, or actually even if you’re not into Star Wars, Visions is the coolest anthology that I think they’ve ever done since the Gennady Star Wars Clones original art that was very animated.

David Read:
The one that was out back in the day.

Jenny Stiven:
It is so cool. The first group were, I think, all Japanese artists and directors and storytellers. Some of them I liked, some of them I didn’t.

David Read:
It’s Animatrix.

Jenny Stiven:
It is so cool. It is so gorgeous. I highly recommend it for anybody who is a cosplayer, a creative, an animator, a drawer, an illustrator, or plain a huge fan of those things. I’m not a cosplayer and I saw five things that I would’ve dressed up as in a second.

David Read:
All right. There we go. Guys, thank you so much for doing this once again.

Jenny Stiven:
We went two and a half hours. Oh my God.

David Read:
I know. It’s like, “I’m never gonna be able to sustain them for this” and here we are, so hey.

Jenny Stiven:
I’m so sorry. ‘Cause I’m a talker.

David Read:
No. Are you kidding me? This is good.

Darren Sumner:
No, you’re a resource. Let me say, my top-line takeaway from this conversation is even if the next Stargate doesn’t come from Brad’s typewriter, Amazon is looking to do something big. It’s not a little property that’s gonna fade away and we’re gonna have to keep ringing the bell and knocking on the door saying, “Hey, we matter too.”

Jenny Stiven:
No.

Darren Sumner:
Amazon is currently strategizing to go big.

David Read:
When they do go for it, we better be ready. We better be ready to respond. Because if we don’t, and they don’t get the audience, who knows when there’ll be another project again.

Jenny Stiven:
My gut is that this is this window of opportunity. And Darren, again, based on the information we have right now, that is my feeling, and that’s my gut feeling and I think that we have a window of opportunity.

David Read:
Thank you, guys. Jenny Stiven of Cleo Consulting, Darren Sumner of GateWorld.

Darren Sumner:
Thank you.

David Read:
Jenny, you and I will be back for Trivia.

Jenny Stiven:
For Trivia.

David Read:
That’s right. Darren, have a wonderful holiday, OK?

Darren Sumner:
You too.

Jenny Stiven:
Happy holidays.

David Read:
You guys take care of yourselves.

Darren Sumner:
Happy holidays, everybody.

Jenny Stiven:
Bye, guys.

David Read:
Bye-bye.

Darren Sumner:
We’ll see you in 2023.

David Read:
Sounds good. Darren Sumner of GateWorld and Jenny Stiven of Clio Consulting. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you found that informative. You may have to go back and watch it again because there’s a lot of information there. I had a couple of questions as a holdover. Jeremy Heiner, “Are you familiar with the YouTube channel Space Dock? They do a lot of starship breakdowns, including Stargate ships. It’d be a fun interview to collaborate with.” I am aware of Space Dock. I should reach out to them and see if they’d be interested in doing something. Teresa Mc, “What are the top authentic props you would like to add to your collection?” Man. That I don’t already have? I don’t know. I’m pretty fortunate in terms of the Stargate front in terms of props, so I can’t think of anything. I’m in a really happy place. Maybe some art. I’m a bit of an art fanatic. I was recently invited to take part in Trekological, a Star Trek shakedown podcast, where I contributed to the Star Trek III: Search for Spock co-captains commentary. It was a really fun time. I have to say, being with my buddy Justin again, Vactor and his buddy Shoff was a terrific episode. So, if you wanna be a part of that and tuning in with them, you’re more than welcome to go to Trekological. That link is in the description below for this episode. Which one am I in? I think I’m in the one for December 1st. So, that’s where you can find me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this episode. My moderating team, my producer, Linda “GateGabber” Fury, you are the best. Sommer, Tracy, Keith, Jeremy, Rhys, and Antony, you guys make the show possible week after week. Frederick Marcoux, my web developer for Dial the Gate, helping me keep everything running over there. You can visit dialthegate.com. It has all the current shows listed for the rest of the year ready to go. I think that’s all that I’ve got for you guys. Hope you found this episode informative. I really appreciate everyone who tuned in. We were at 130 concurrent viewers for the top. This is a series that continually performs well. Thank you again, Jenny, for all of your analysis. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, I’ll see you on the other side.