The Sci-Fi Icon Hollywood Can’t Reboot: 45 Years Since His Last TV Appearance

Every few years someone promises to bring Buck Rogers back, and every few years the ship never leaves the dock. Here is how a character who helped put sci-fi TV on the map keeps getting stuck in development limbo, despite serious talent trying to launch him.

The late-70s space rush that set the stage

By the mid-70s, reruns of Star Trek had quietly built a die-hard base, and then Star Wars blew the doors off in 1977. Networks smelled opportunity and raced to stake out their own galaxies. ABC fired first with Battlestar Galactica in 1978, throwing real money at effects that, for TV back then, were jaw-dropping. NBC countered with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, developed by Glen A. Larson and Leslie Stevens and based on Philip Francis Nowlan's pulp hero.

In a very 1979 move, Universal tested the waters by releasing a Buck Rogers pilot as a theatrical feature that March. It pulled in $21 million in North America, which was enough for Universal to greenlight a weekly series on the spot. For a minute there, Buck was a legit pop-culture player.

Quick refresher: what the show actually was

The series follows William 'Buck' Rogers (Gil Gerard), a 20th-century NASA astronaut who ends up in suspended animation for 500 years and wakes up to a post-nuclear Earth staring down alien threats. He teams up with Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) and the pint-sized robot Twiki (Felix Silla). Across two seasons and 32 episodes, the show even reinvented itself: Season 2 ditched the Earth-bound setup for a more exploratory, ship-based format. Ratings still slid, and on April 16, 1981, NBC aired the Season 2 episode The Dorian Secret, which turned out to be the series finale. That broadcast was the last time Buck Rogers appeared in live-action. That was 45 years ago.

So why has Buck been benched for so long?

Short version: lots of heat, endless rights drama, and projects that collapsed right when they looked real.

• 2000s: Frank Miller signs on to direct a new Buck Rogers movie. That evaporates after his solo directing debut, The Spirit (2008), gets savaged by critics and flops at the box office.
• 2015: Producer Don Murphy says he is revving up a feature. Years of lawsuits over competing copyright claims follow, and no one in town wants to bankroll that headache.
• 2020: The legal fog seems to lift enough for Legendary Entertainment to jump in with Murphy, producer Susan Montford, and Flint Dille (grandson of original Buck publisher John F. Dille). They pitch big: a prestige TV series, a movie, and even an anime spin-off. In December, Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Saga) signs on to write the series. January 2021, George Clooney and Grant Heslov board as executive producers via Smokehouse. For the first time in ages, it feels like an actual thing.
• February 2021: That momentum lasts, what, two weeks? The Nowlan Family Trust — the estate of Buck's creator Philip Francis Nowlan — sends Legendary a cease-and-desist, saying the estate already cut a deal with David Ellison's Skydance. Legendary pushes back, but the very public tug-of-war freezes everything. Result: no Legendary series, no Skydance film, no cameras rolling anywhere.
• October 2025: Legendary quietly pivots to a feature again and hires Zeb Wells (a co-writer of Deadpool & Wolverine ) to draft a new Buck Rogers script. As of now, there is still no director, no cast, and no release date. The project is technically alive, just idling.

Where things stand now

Buck Rogers first hit print in 1928 and helped define late-70s sci-fi TV, but the modern reboot effort keeps getting dragged back to Earth by business snarls and bad timing. The latest movie draft is in the works, on paper at least. Will it actually happen? Maybe. I will believe it when I see a set photo that is not from 1979.