Quantum Leap Creator Has A Script For A Reboot

During a Quantum Leap reunion Q&A panel at the Los Angeles Comic Con, series creator Donald Bellisario revealed that he has completed a script for a rebooted feature film.

It’s hardly anything particularly new, because there’s been toying around about a feature length film ever since the early 2000s, when the news arm for the then-SciFi channel revealed that they would develop a two-hour tv movie which would serve as a back-door pilot for a new series with Bellisario executive producing. That effort hadn’t received much traction and then in 2010, series lead Scott Bakula said at that year’s San Diego Comic Con that a feature film was in the works, and that Bellisario was “working on a script for the film.”

So the latest news is only that the script seems to have been finalized (at least seven years later). It’s true that Bellisario has had a lot on his plate, as he has been the executive producer on NCIS for the past 15 seasons.

During this latest panel in LACC, Bellisario said:

I write things exactly the same way. I just start writing and I let them take me wherever it’s going to take me. I’m entertained the same way the audience is. So I just put Scott [Bakula] and Dean [Stockwell] in my head, kind of rebooted them, and went from there.

Bakula, who was also present at the Q&A, spoke about the 1989-1993’s series finale:

It was a great episode. Last episodes are always controversial. I always say to writers, ‘If you want a challenge more than writing just an hour of television, write an hour of television that is the last hour of television that that show will ever have on; write it so that it could also come back next fall; write it so that it could possibly become a movie of the week; [and] write it so that it could still potentially be a feature film someday. And make everybody happy… If you go back and watch that episode, [Bellisario] checked off all those boxes.

So that comment speaks of helping bring increased closure to fans of the series, but Bellisario’s comment indicates that the characters were rebooted. So a continuation or a reboot? Given penchants for networks these days, I’m betting on a reboot with Bakula and Stockwell having token cameos (unless they go the alternate-universe route, which is always a possibility, but then we’ve just got another Sliders).