The 1970s were a massive decade for sci-fi. Star Trek‘s reruns had spent the better part of the decade building a devoted audience, and when Star Wars arrived in theaters in 1977 to shatter box office expectations, network executives rushed to capture that energy with their own space-set properties. For instance, Battlestar Galactica launched in 1978 as ABC’s direct answer to George Lucas’s blockbuster, spending lavishly on effects that were, at the time, considered extraordinary for television. NBC, in its turn, released Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a sci-fi TV show developed by Glen A. Larson and Leslie Stevens and based on the legendary character created by Philip Francis Nowlan. Buck Rogers‘s theatrical pilot, released in March 1979, earned $21 million at the North American box office, a number that convinced Universal to immediately order a full weekly series. What followed was a series that would become its own cultural phenomenon.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century follows the titular William “Buck” Rogers (Gil Gerard), a 20th-century NASA astronaut frozen in suspended animation for 500 years and thrust into a post-nuclear Earth under alien threat. Alongside Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) and the diminutive robot Twiki (Felix Silla), the character appeared in 32 episodes across two seasons, with the show shifting dramatically in its second year toward a more exploratory format built around a mobile starship. That pivot was not enough to sustain the ratings, and on April 16, 1981, NBC broadcast “The Dorian Secret,” the thirteenth episode of Season 2 and the final chapter of the series. With that broadcast, Buck Rogers disappeared from live-action television entirely and has remained absent for 45 years.
The popularity of the Buck Rogers TV show, added to its vast publication history, led to multiple spinoffs and reboot projects, all of which failed to get into production. The first serious attempt to bring the character back came from comic book artist and writer Frank Miller, who was attached in the 2000s to direct a theatrical adaptation. That prospect ended abruptly when Miller’s solo directorial debut, The Spirit, was released in 2008 to catastrophic reviews and negligible box office returns. By 2015, producer Don Murphy announced renewed plans to develop a new feature film, but the production became mired in years of litigation over competing copyright claims that no studio was willing to finance.
By 2020, those legal disputes appeared sufficiently resolved for Legendary Entertainment to move forward alongside Murphy, producer Susan Montford, and Flint Dille, the latter the grandson of original Buck Rogers publisher John F. Dille. Legendary announced an ambitious multi-platform strategy that would include a prestige television series, a film, and an anime spin-off. In December 2020, celebrated comic writer Brian K. Vaughan, known for Y: The Last Man and Saga, was brought on to write the television series. Then, in January 2021, George Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov attached themselves to executive produce through their Smokehouse banner. The project had, for the first time in decades, genuine momentum and commercial-grade talent behind it.
That momentum lasted approximately two weeks. In February 2021, the Nowlan Family Trust — the estate of Buck Rogers creator Philip Francis Nowlan — fired off a cease-and-desist letter to Legendary, asserting that the estate had already signed a separate agreement with David Ellison’s Skydance Productions. Legendary disputed the claims, but the public dispute was enough to stall the entire operation. Neither the Legendary television series nor the Skydance film ever entered production.
The most recent development arrived in October 2025, when Legendary announced that Zeb Wells, a co-writer of Deadpool & Wolverine, had been brought on to write a new draft of a Buck Rogers feature film. The project technically remains in development, although no director is attached, no cast has been announced, and no release date exists. For a character who first appeared in print in 1928 and helped define science fiction television at the close of the 1970s, the current state of the franchise is a holding pattern that has now stretched across the full careers of multiple generations of filmmakers.
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