Great news for fans of the classic Sci-Fi show Babylon 5, after a very successful animated movie hit stores this month, Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to keep the remastered version of the show on The Roku Channel and Tubi. Now new fans can watch the original show before they watch the new Babylon 5: The Road Home movie.
Earlier this month, Babylon 5 left The Roku Channel, and Tubi started to warn customers the show would be leaving the service before the end of August 2023. Now the show has returned to The Roku Channel, and Tubi has removed the warning message about the show leaving.
This comes as Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this year announced deals with The Roku Channel and Tubi to bring their content to the free streaming service. This deal will bring a huge catalog of content to both services.
Babylon 5 has been in the process of rebooting the show for a new generation but the current stats of it is on hold as the writers strike and actors strike along with the change in ownership at The CW has delayed it.
The reboot series was announced back in September of 2021 with J. Michael Straczynski writing the pilot episode as well as running the series. The project is “still in limbo at the CW and is now, like many things in the biz, on hold,” according to a recent TVLine article.
J. Michael Straczynski worked on the original Babylon 5 series as a writer, director, and producer. The series spawned from a 1993 made-for-television movie and ran from 1993 to 1998 totaling 110 episodes over five seasons as well as inspiring several spinoff series and films.
The plot for the reboot is described as:
In a from-the-ground-up reboot of the original series, John Sheridan, an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers, and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war. His arrival triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.
With the project being in limbo for now, fans must wait out the ongoing WGA writers’ strike and possible SAG-AFTRA strike before more news on further developments of Babylon 5. Everything is pretty much at a standstill until then. Hopefully though strong sales of the new movie will help Warner Bros. Discovery push the reboot into reality.