Sometimes Hollywood does us a favor. Hulu just saved everyone from another nostalgia cash-grab by killing its planned revival of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sarah Michelle Gellar was set to return as the vampire-hunting cheerleader two decades after hanging up her stake, but the streaming service wisely decided the world doesn’t need a fifty-something Buffy fighting teen vampires under mood lighting.
This doomed project, called Buffy: New Sunnydale, wasn’t a reboot, at least according to the people selling it. Supposedly, it was a “continuation” of the original series, complete with a new team of heroes and maybe, if fans behaved, a cameo or two from the old gang. Sounds familiar? That’s because the industry has made a cottage business of recycling fan nostalgia while pretending it’s creativity. But this time, Hulu hit the brakes before the disaster could stream into your living room.
Gellar tried to soften the blow by explaining that Hulu executives decided not to release the show, calling it disappointing for fans. Disappointing? Not really. Necessary? Absolutely. The last thing TV needs is another clumsy revival aimed at a modern audience that lectures instead of entertains. The comparison practically writes itself when you remember the Lizzie McGuire reboot that Disney+ buried two years ago for “creative” reasons.
As if that weren’t enough, scripts from the canned Buffy project leaked online, giving curious fans a peek at what might have been. Gellar, sounding more like a PR manager than a vampire slayer, told people to look away, and don’t look at the leaks. She even brought up Warner Bros.’ scrapped, woke Batgirl movie, as if that might help, calling the situation “unfortunate.”
Here’s her full statement:
“I actually hope it doesn’t [leak], because then everyone’s going to have an opinion on this and that. And pilots are not finished. It wasn’t done, right? It’s not like we did a season and finished it and then they shelved it. [‘Batgirl’] was finished. I want to clarify this, we made a pilot on purpose, because there’s some new characters…and you want to see how it goes…you learn from it and there’s things you fix.”
Translation: they made one episode, realized it didn’t work, and Hulu pulled the plug.
Director Chloé Zhao also jumped into the press junket routine, telling everyone she had “an incredible time” working on the project and saw herself as a “guardian” of the original series. That’s Hollywood code for “We meant well, but it flopped before it started.” She admitted she didn’t know if the show could be picked up by someone else, though she remained “hopeful,” because the world is just begging for more recycled IP from a network that can’t even finish its pilots.
Fans will always love the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but some stories end exactly where they should. The late ’90s version was sharp, clever, and fresh. This Hulu revival? It sounded like a midlife crisis with CGI fangs. For once, a streaming service made the right call. Sometimes, staking the revival really is the heroic thing to do.
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English (US) · 