New ‘Stargate’ Series Recruits Top Talent, Signaling Major Sci-Fi Return for the Franchise

There’s Stargate series news: The next phase of the Stargate franchise is starting to take clearer shape—and it’s doing so with an impressive level of talent behind the scenes. According to reporting from GateWorld.net and the Dial the Gate YouTube channel, the upcoming Stargate television series has enlisted two highly accomplished artists to oversee its production design and visual effects, suggesting that Amazon MGM Studios is aiming for a top-tier streaming presentation from the outset.

Stepping in as production designer is Academy Award winner Nathan Crowley, a veteran of visually ambitious, large-scale filmmaking. Over the course of his career, Crowley has developed a close creative partnership with director Christopher Nolan, contributing to films including Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet.

Although he had accumulated seven Academy Award nominations and multiple BAFTA nominations over the years, Crowley only secured his first Oscar relatively recently. In 2025, he and set decorator Lee Sandales won both the Academy Award and BAFTA for their work on Wicked, finally bringing long-overdue recognition to his contributions. His work in television includes HBO’s Westworld, which earned him an Emmy nomination and demonstrated his ability to bring a cinematic sensibility to serialized storytelling.

For his part, during the video Crowley stated, “This was a natural progression of my journey as a designer, to push into world building. I can’t do police stations and hospitals anymore.” And when it comes to the franchise as a hole, he added, “You have to respect the world it lives in and thus the fan bases, so you have to keep one foot in. But because we’re now launching onto something new, we have to put the other foot out as far as we can. If you just copy what you think everyone loves, I think you’re going to fall into a trap. You really have to try and produce something that appears new but isn’t. If you can find that middle ground where you don’t upset everyone, but they’re taken away and you give them a new thing to fall in love with, then I think you’ve done your task as a designer.” 

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Upgraded visual effects

Handling visual effects for the series is Mohen Leo, an Emmy-winning supervisor with extensive experience across both film and television. His film credits include The Martian, Ant-Man and Deepwater Horizon, though he is perhaps most widely recognized for his work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. That project earned him an Academy Award nomination as part of the team responsible for delivering roughly 1,700 visual effects shots.

Leo has also made a significant impact on the television side. He served as visual effects supervisor on Season 2 of Andor, where his work earned an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season or Movie. His long association with Industrial Light & Magic dates back to 1996, when he joined the company as a technical director and effects animator, contributing to films such as Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and Pearl Harbor. He later worked on The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions at Esc Entertainment before returning to ILM.

That background is particularly relevant for Stargate, a franchise that has always utilized strong visual effects to realize its expansive worlds and mythology. ILM has already contributed to major Prime Video productions including Fallout and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, offering a glimpse of the scale Amazon is willing to support.

“I very much remember watching the movie for the first time,” Leo reflected in the conversation. “And at the time that was one of the big sci-fi event movies. I particularly loved the culmination of science fiction with the ancient history and mythology. It’s certainly a franchise that I’ve been aware of over the years and have seen how passionate people are about it and how deep it is also in terms of lore and the world and everything.”

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As to the approach to visual effects, he added, “We want to create something that is still grounded, that is grounded in reality. In order for the audience to really care about the characters and participate in their emotions, you have to make sure that the world itself is believable and relatable. What’s often a good way to think about it is not necessarily what exactly did it look like 20 or 30 years ago, but how do you remember it? You’re just trying to hit that with the most advanced technology, the best quality that you can. You want to ideally have every shot be grounded in something real.”

Bringing Crowley and Leo on board further underscores what has been hinted at in recent months: that the new Stargate series is being developed as a premium streaming project, with the resources to match its ambitions. Currently operating under the working title Stargate, the show is expected to play a key role in relaunching the franchise—which had previously included SG-1, Atlantis and Universe—for Prime Video.

Series creator Martin Gero confirmed the additions during a livestream conversation with Dial the Gate and Gateworld, providing one of the clearest updates yet on the production’s progress. The series is presently in the scriptwriting stage, with plans to begin principal photography in London this fall. Story details remain under wraps for now, but the level of talent being assembled suggests that this new iteration of Stargate is aiming well beyond a straightforward revival. Instead, it appears positioned to reintroduce the franchise with a broader scope and a more cinematic visual approach tailored to today’s streaming landscape.

Reflecting on it all, Gero shared, “The scope of this show is the ones we had the ambition for in the last version of the show, but didn’t have the means. And now we have the means and quite frankly, the time. Capturing the feeling of Stargate is more important to us than capturing the exact aesthetic look. We’re not doing a direct photocopy of what this show was. It’s built for a different era. It’s on a streaming platform versus doing 22 episodes, so the storytelling is slightly different. The show that we thought we were making even four weeks ago has changed. The pilot has remained unchanged. The characters have remained unchanged. Most of their arcs, honestly, have remained unchanged. We’re trying to lower the bar for people that maybe haven’t seen all 350 episodes of the last show. We’re trying to honor and elevate.”