J. Michael Straczynski would like to politely remind fans not to pitch him unsolicited Babylon 5 ideas

One of the most ambitious sci-fi series ever made, Babylon 5, is potentially coming back for a reboot series at The CW — but the show’s creator is having to sidestep some of that fan excitement to keep it all on track.

J. Michael Straczynski, who created the original early-1990’s series about the aliens and crew on a bustling space station, is putting together the plan for the reboot right now. To that end, he’s taken to Twitter to politely remind fans he’s already had to start blocking folks because they’re pitching him unsolicited ideas for the reboot. The move is pretty standard among creatives, as unsolicited pitches can create a liability (since if they ended up using an idea randomly pitched to him on social media, even by accident, there could be grounds for a legal claim). 

So, the safest move is to block those accounts to not risk even accidentally seeing one.

Here’s how Straczynski explained it:

We already know the project will aim to update and recapture the ambition of the original series, which paved the way with season-long narrative arcs and was never afraid to shake-up its status quo and reinvent itself year-to-year. Straczynski himself has called it a “reboot from the ground up,” as opposed to some type of continuation of the original series.

"In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: If I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like?,” Straczynski explained when news of the project broke. “How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then? How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day?”

As far as a timeline, there’s no word on if the project will make it out of the development phase and actually score a full season pick-up. Fans are excited and have plenty of ideas, of course, but it’s all still too early. But Straczynski did offer up some general information on how long the process typically takes, noting they will likely finalize the script over the next couple of months and could potentially shoot a pilot around March 2022.