The #SaveStargate campaign isn’t slowing down, it’s expanding.
After putting a banner plane in the sky over Amazon MGM’s Culver City lot earlier this month, the fan effort is taking its message coast-to-coast: organizers say they’ll rally in Times Square on June 27 in front of billboards demanding Amazon MGM Studios reinstate Martin Gero’s canceled Stargate series.
It’s the most ambitious move yet from a campaign that has spent three weeks refusing to take a cancellation as the final word, and it lands with the petition past 100,000 verified signatures and Amazon still saying nothing.
From a Plane Over LA to Billboards in New York
The Times Square push comes from the same fan-funded operation behind the June 16 banner flyover over Amazon MGM Studios.
Organizer James Kerfoot, whose GoFundMe bankrolled that plane, says the same fundraising has now covered the New York billboards with more planned beyond it.
“Our first stop was California to fly a banner over the Culver City Studios,” Kerfoot said in a statement. “There is a global fanbase that is still going strong nearly thirty years after Stargate SG-1 first premiered. We knew we couldn’t limit our efforts to California, so this week we rally in NYC to have our voices heard.”
The Times Square rally is set for Saturday, June 27, from 1 to 2 p.m. ET, per the campaign’s events calendar. Fans who can’t be there in person are being invited to follow along via livestream, the same playbook that drew a sizable online crowd during the Culver City flyover, when a fan-run stream reportedly pulled more than 92,000 viewers as the plane went up.
The cast escalation has tracked right alongside the stunts. SG-1‘s Michael Shanks, Atlantis stars Rachel Luttrell and Robert Patrick, and others have all lent their voices. Patrick most recently spelled out why he jumped in, telling fans “some things are worth getting loud about.”
A #SaveStargate tweetstorm is also planned for Wednesday.
The Argument: Fans Are the Free Advertising
Strip away the planes and billboards and the campaign keeps making the same unglamorous business case, the one Amazon’s own reported reasoning for the cancellation runs directly against. Kerfoot put it about as plainly as it can be put.
“It has been beautiful to watch the Stargate community come together. People have been sharing online how the show brought them closer to their parents, or how they’ve made fans of their kids,” said Kerfoot. “Martin Gero knows how to build a successful franchise that is beloved, decades later. We hope Amazon MGM hears us and realizes that current fans are the best free advertising they could ever ask for.”
Amazon reportedly walked away because executives feared Gero’s take wouldn’t reach beyond the existing fanbase, and the existing fanbase responded by self-organizing across two coasts, funding their own ad campaign, and recruiting new viewers in the process.
A studio worried a franchise might “only” appeal to people who already love it is being shown, in real time, that those people are an asset, not a ceiling.
It’s the same logic this site keeps coming back to: the audience that shows up to fight is the most honest demand signal a studio will ever get, and it’s being handed to Amazon for free.
Amazon Still Hasn’t Said a Word
Three weeks after Variety reported the series was scrapped, Amazon MGM Studios has stayed completely silent, with no statement on the petition, the flyover, or the tweet storms that have pushed Stargate to trend on X more than once.
Cosmic Book News reached out to Amazon MGM Studios for comment on the cancellation and the fan campaign and did not receive a response.
As we’ve covered, the project was canceled roughly 20 weeks into preproduction under Gero, Joe Mallozzi, and Brad Wright, with filming set for the fall, a decision widely tied to the studio’s executive shakeup.
Mallozzi, for his part, has kept the fandom engaged daily and has been blunt about the dynamic, arguing that genre executives hold their audiences in “contempt”. The billboards are the fans’ answer: if the studio won’t look at the data in a spreadsheet, they’ll put it on a screen in Times Square.
“Just the Next Stop, Not the Last One”
Kerfoot is framing New York as a waypoint, not a finish line, and the campaign’s calendar backs that up.
Times Square is billed as the “America” stop, with a “Europe” edition slated for July 18, a “World” event timed to San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, and a cheeky “Space” edition penciled in for August (details on the overseas dates are still to come).
Between the big set pieces, organizers are running regular community action days and Prime Video watch parties aimed squarely at boosting the franchise’s streaming numbers, the exact kind of measurable engagement Amazon says it wants to see.
“Times Square is just the next stop, not the last one. We’re not going away anytime soon,” said Kerfoot.
For context on the franchise Amazon is sitting on: Stargate spans the 1994 theatrical film plus the two direct-to-DVD SG-1 features, The Ark of Truth and Continuum; three live-action series — SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe — that ran a combined 17 seasons from 1997 to 2011; and the 2018 prequel miniseries Stargate Origins.
That’s nearly three decades of canon and a fanbase that, on the evidence of the last three weeks, hasn’t gone anywhere.
The gate’s still open. Whether Amazon MGM looks up — in Culver City, in Times Square, or anywhere else — remains the only question that counts.
