While Johnson isn't involved in the new television series, he still holds the movie rights to V, and he's convinced that whether the new show is a success or a flop, it can only mean good things for him:

If the show succeeds, it gives us an opportunity to go out with a one sheet that says, 'You like the show, now see the original classic reborn,' [and] if the show doesn't do well, we can always say, 'Here is the "V" you've been waiting for.'

If you've been waiting for a relatively-low budget independent movie, that is:

When I discovered that I controlled the motion picture rights to 'V,' I suddenly had a lot of new best friends. All the major studios, Fox, Paramount, MGM, Warners, wanted to buy the rights with a whole lot of money. They see it as a $200 million tentpole picture, and want to bring someone else to direct. I took a deep breath and said no... I got into the business to direct and do what I do. So what we've been endeavoring to do is to set up an independent production and produce this movie for $50 million. So I can hang on to the director reins and make sure it gets done.

Why are we worried that a Johnson-directed movie may end up like Richard Hatch's Battlestar Galactica sequel? Because Johnson says things like this:

There's a sense that not only do I know the themes, but it's also because I've had that one on one connection with the audience over the years... I really listened to them and have got a pretty good sense of how to make 'V' work.

Fanservice, here we come...?

The television reboot of V premieres on ABC on November 3rd.

'V' voice revisits familiar turf [Variety]

Talking to Moviehole, Hatch suggests that whoever ends up making the BSG movie reboot should take a page from JJ Abrams' playbook:

[They s]hould go further back like Star Trek [where it] was still the characters we love, but they went back twenty...thirty... years to when they were just kids. But with Battlestar, they're just going to go back to the same timeframe we saw in the series' and recast those roles. I don't think Star Trek would've been successful if they had recast the Star Trek characters at the same age as they were in the previous films. By going back, it gave that film a window so fans could expect a change of cast... I recently saw the original Battlestar movie on the IMAX screen, as part of the 25th anniversary convention, and let me tell you, it was born for the IMAX! Even with the bad matte paintings on the original, it still looked amazing on the big screen! If they did it today, a full-blown movie of Battlestar, I think it would be amazing... so long as whoever does it understands the characters, the heart & soul, and mythology of it. I just hope they really get it.

But that's not all that Hatch was talking about; as well as suggesting that Ron Moore's version of the franchise may continue past The Plan TV movie ("It's never the end if fans want more. It's a money game. If they realize people want more, believe me, they'll make more of them - they did it with Babylon 5, and a number of other sci-fi shows"), he also offered up his takes on a couple of this summer's sci-fi movies. For example, he didn't really dig Terminator Salvation:

If I was an actor of Christian Bale's calibre, would you not look at that script and say ‘there's something wrong here'? ...I don't understand why Bale wanted to play Connor. What they should've done is make the focus the John Connor character Or make the focus the John Connor character and the Marcus character. Why did Christian Bale do this movie!?
He had similar misgivings about X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

The trailer looked great, but the movie just didn't work. When you get someone that gets the story, and the characters, of something it's rare. What's happening with these big franchises is that some very talented actors and writers are being hired but they mightn't be right for this particular story. Films are made for all the wrong reasons sometimes.

If you somehow don't end up with a cameo on the next version of Battlestar Galactica, Richard, you should look into movie criticism... The world could always do with some more bitter, disillusioned critics.

Hatch On Galactica Movie [Moviehole]

Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming was (one of) Hatch's unsuccessful tries to get a sequel series to the original BSG made; this particular teaser dates from 1999, and shows us just what we missed. Somehow, I'm not that upset that we got the version that we did...

[YouTube]

The unfinished CGI animations looked incredibly cool, but super video game-y and old-fashioned, coming from 2001. There was a scene on an "agro-ship," with plants in a giant hangar space. The shots of vipers and raptors flying around were made to look like 16-mm. newsreel footage, with a camera attached to the tail or front of the vipers. And the vipers were designed to be able to flip around. We saw footage of the New Caprica space colony, with streets and street signs, on a planet. The show's version of Battlestar Galactica had big battleship-type guns, like in a World War II film. The animatics looked very clean and crisp, and the vipers looked very nimble. And we saw vipers being launched through tubes on the side of the Battlestar, followed by a shootout inside an asteroid field and a game of chicken on a barren planetoid. And then there was footage of the Cylons, doing backflips and looking acrobatic, then squatting down with their legs apart and shooting. There was even a funny clip of a Cylon lifting its leg, winding up, and throwing a baseball.

The show would have had designs by Guy Hendrix Dyas, who also worked on Singer's X-Men movies.

In the abortive 2001 version, it was 20 years after the original series, and the humans had taken a vote and decided to abandon the search for Earth. They'd found an asteroid field and set up the New Caprica colony there, and over the following two decades they'd gotten decadant and become obsessed with glitz and pleasure domes and gambling. According to producer Tom DeSanto, it was as if the Jews had stopped at Mount Sinai and set up Las Vegas. And then the Cylons show up and attack.

That was the part, with the cylon sneak attack on the colonies, that worried the Fox execs. They put the pilot on hold for a month or so, with casting only partly complete. And by the time the network regained its nerve, Bryan Singer "had to do a Sophie's Choice" and choose between BSG and X-Men 2. He went off to work on X-2, leaving BSG unfinished.

In the end of pilot, we would go to the planet Cylon, and the camera would dive through the mysterious clouds, down through a tangle of mechanized buildings, and you'd hear the voice that has been instructing the Cylon attackers earlier in the show. You would zoom in on the source of the voice as it talks about the future and the need to convert humanity. And it turns out the Cylons are led by a group of humans who have been "converted" into Cylons. And the leader of this group is none other than Richard Hatch, aka Apollo. It turns out Apollo was captured and became part of the "Cylon collective." (Yes, just like the Borg.) The series would have been about the relationship between Apollo and his son, who's the new Commander of Galactica. The son would have been struggling to redeem his father's humanity and bring him back from Cylon-hood.

Producer Tom DeSanto told Comic-Con Singer's production company was working on a $13.5 million backdoor pilot for a new BSG, which would air on Fox and then on the Sci Fi Channel. The episodes would have been letterboxed, and the repeat airings on Sci Fi would have had extra footage. DeSanto said the story of the humans "forgetting their purpose" and living in super-capitalist decadence on New Caprica mirrored what he was seeing of his friends during the tech boom around 1999-2000, with people obsessing about their stock portfolios. And just like the Cylon attacks in the abortive Singer pilot, 9/11 brought people back to a sense of purpose.

And here's some BSG 2001 concept art from Nathan Shroeder. More at the link: