What's our position on questions of the form "Are there any plans for a new series of X?"?

Question

Today I came across two old questions (both by the same user and posted on the same day, oddly enough) which are very similar in form but have been treated very differently:

• https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/96/are-there-any-plans-for-a-new-star-trek-tv-series (closed, 3 pending votes to delete)
• Are there any plans for a new Babylon 5 series or movies? (open, has never been closed)

This seems rather silly. Whatever our position is on such questions, it should at least be consistent. Unless there's some difference I'm missing between these two questions, they should either both be closed or both be open. The purpose of this meta post is to find out which.

What is the community's position on such questions?

_{If anyone finds more examples like these two questions (whether open or closed), give me a link and I'll edit them in.}

Update: the second of the above questions has now also been closed, and the first has been deleted. Seems fairly conclusive.

Answer 1

I believe these questions should be closed because they usually can't be answered and tend to encourage speculative answers. Arguably they're a special case of our existing "future works" policy. Both of the examples linked by the OP contain what I would consider speculative answers.

The exception would be questions that explicitly exclude the future in some way, e.g. "Were there plans to make another X before Y happened?", since the answer to that won't change even if a new X does get made someday.

Answer 2

I see these questions as completely objective. Are there any plans¹? - you can answer this with Yes or No; and then back up with the appropriate evidence.

Speculative answers indicate a problem with those answers, not with the question.

_{1 Of course, you really need to ask if there are any plans that have been made public but the gist of the question is clear to me.}