I have to admit, although I have DVR every episode of Stargate: Atlantis starting with this year, I was a little shock to realize that it had been on the air for five years. Now it appears as if the show’s current fifth season will also be its last, with the Sci Fi Channel planning on shutting down production on the series and moving the cast/crew onto a Stargate: Atlantis movie franchise, similar to what they recently did with Stargate: SG1. That venture, it would appear, proved successful enough that the Sci Fi Channel now wants to do the same with Atlantis.

The news comes from Multichannel.com:

Space drama Stargate Atlantis will conclude its run on Sci Fi Channel after the current, fifth season ends next January — but the network has greenlit a two-hour Atlantis movie to run after that and says the show will live on as a network franchise.

After airing on Sci Fi sometime next year, the untitled Atlantis movie will be sold as a home-video title by producer MGM, Sci Fi told Multichannel News on Wednesday.

MGM this year released two financially successful straight-to-DVD movies made after progenitor series Stargate SG-1 ended a 10-year run of first-run cable episodes on Sci Fi. MGM and the show producers are scheduled to make more in DVDs in future. A movie franchise is also envisioned for Stargate Atlantis.

Longtime Stargate writers and producers (and Atlantis show runners) Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie will write the Atlantis feature script. Other details, such as how many cast members would participate or who would direct, were not immediately available.

According to Gateworld, MGM, the studio that owns the Stargate franchise, has announced that they will be releasing a press release on Thursday. If that’s the case, then the news would seem to be true, otherwise why would they go through the trouble of a press release when they could easily just deny it as rumor?