The Buffy reboot is dead, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is not okay with how any of it went down. Hulu passed on Buffy: New Sunnydale, Gellar broke the news herself on Instagram, and now she’s out on the press circuit for Ready or Not 2, answering questions about it at every stop.
She Doesn’t Want the Pilot Leaking Either
On SiriusXM’s Page Six Radio, a host said he hoped the pilot would leak online so fans could see it. Gellar disagreed. “I actually hope it doesn’t because then everyone’s going to have an opinion on this and that, and pilots are not finished,” she said. “It wasn’t done. It’s not like we did a season, finished it, and then they shelved it.“
She also flagged that a version of the script already circulating online is not even the correct one. “That stuff is really unfortunate, and I ask fans, if you see scripts, if you see it leaked, don’t watch it because you’re not getting our vision.“
The pilot was directed by Chloé Zhao, who won two Oscars for Nomadland and picked up two more nominations this year for Hamnet.
Gellar has said that Zhao is the reason she said yes to coming back at all, after resisting it for years. The setup had a new 16-year-old slayer named Nova, played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, with Gellar’s Buffy Summers showing up alongside her.
In the original draft, Buffy barely appeared until the very end with one line.
Gellar blamed the cancellation directly on a 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 said. Sources have identified the executive as Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich.
Reports, on the other side, say the pilot simply wasn’t good enough, and a rewrite didn’t fix it enough to warrant a series order. One source compared it to finishing a renovation and discovering the foundation is broken.
Disney owns the Buffy IP, so the project can’t be shopped anywhere else. For now, it’s just dead.
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