Director of The Last Of Us, one of HBO’s greatest dystopian additions to sci-fi, as well as the genre-defining Doctor Who, Peter Hoar, and the exec from Netflix’s underrated murder mystery, A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, Matthew Bouch, are reviving a long-thought-dead sci-fi series nearly 50 years after it was cancelled. And with names like that behind the production, it’s promising to be nothing short of incredible.
According to Deadline, the pair has opened their own indie, genre-based production studio, Multitude Productions, and now intend to make a reboot of the cult British sci-fi classic Blake’s 7. The original show, a political drama set in space, centered around a group of convicts and outcasts on their highly advanced spaceship who must now fight a rebellion against the totalitarian Terran Federation. Hoar says that he would love for the new series to air on the BBC, where the original found its home. “The Blake’s 7 story is legendary because they were given the [British police show] Softly, Softly slot that was intended for police drama with a budget intended for one big set and a few location shoots.”
Why Blake’s 7?
When asked why he was so passionate about bringing Blake’s 7 back to life, Bouch says, “We’re driven by our passions but also seeing that there is a gap in the market in the UK—particularly with the well-publicized dropping off of Doctor Who—for genre-based British IP.” He adds, “We look back at when we were young with a degree of nostalgia but also thinking about the 70s and 80s as we were growing up and the amount of genre material that was available, whether it was Blake’s 7 or the Narnia adaptation. We are looking to the international market and seeing if there is a way of dovetailing that British low-budget sensibility with international markets. We know in the U.S. there’s a big contraction, and we all need to think about finding ways to make things more economical.”
And while the cult-classic sci-fi is a great start for Multitude Productions, it’s certainly not the only project that the newly minted studio is hoping to bring to life. Other productions they have their eyes on include Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek book series, which Hoar describes as a “British Stranger Things crossed with Skins,” Rikako Akiyoshi’s The Dark Maidens, and The Search for the Dice Man.
Are you looking forward to the reboot of Blake’s 7? Let us know your thoughts in the comments, and then check out the ComicBook forum to see what other sci-fi fans are saying.