Not since the Scoobies evicted Buffy from her own damn house has the BtVS fandom felt so betrayed. Hulu decided not to move forward with Buffy: New Sunnydale, the reboot masterminded by Chloé Zhao and done with full participation of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now folks are playing the blame game, trying to sic the stans on each other.
Sources leaked the pilot script to Variety and said the problems lay in Zhao’s Academy Award–winning directorial style. Variety said the pilot was “undershot, and there wasn’t any coverage” and that the performances were “under-directed” as well. The trade also noted that the pilot script included only one tease of Buffy herself. Showrunners Lilla and Nora Zuckerman were doing rewrites, all for naught. Apparently, someone felt reshoots wouldn’t have been worth it, and so the whole project was spiked. The original Buffy pilot required extensive reshoots, incidentally, when they recast Willow with Alyson Hannigan.
Gellar, on the other hand, put the blame on one anonymous Hulu executive. “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him,” she told People. Gellar added that she got the news right before having to do press for Ready or Not 2, which shares a production company with New Sunnydale. “No one saw this coming, including the head of Searchlight,” she said. “And I got the call as we were stepping onto stage for the premiere of their own movie. And it’s also the weekend of Chloé going to the Oscars as a best director nominee for Hamnet. For them to call us on the Friday of what should have been Chloé’s victory lap for an incredible film, and my world premiere of something that I worked very hard for is … That says something.”
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