Sarah Michelle Gellar sees no need for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot

Sarah Michelle Gellar is re-entering the supernatural world with Wolf Pack, the new werewolf teen drama on which she is both a producer and star. The combination of SMG and the supernatural inevitably makes fans think of the actor’s first (and best—sorry in advance to the werewolves) foray into the genre with Buffy The Vampire Slayer. But Gellar is happy to leave those days in the past.

The Do Revenge star tells SFX Magazine (via MovieWeb) that she’s not interested in a Buffy reboot. “I am very proud of the show that we created and it doesn’t need to be done. We wrapped that up.” However, she says: “I am all for them continuing the story, because there’s the story of female empowerment. I love the way the show was left: ‘Every girl who has the power can have the power.’ It’s set up perfectly for someone else to have the power.”

As Gellar points out, “the metaphors of Buffy were the horrors of adolescence,” so she doesn’t feel qualified to tell those stories anymore: “I think I look young, but I am not an adolescent.”

A Buffy reboot along those lines was in development back in 2018, with writer Monica Owusu-Breen reportedly working closely with the original series’ creator Joss Whedon. This was after Whedon’s ex-wife had accused him of inappropriate behavior on the Buffy set in an open letter in 2017, but before the writer-director’s reckoning in which he was accused of abuse of power by many subordinates, including Justice League’s Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot and Buffy’s Charisma Carpenter. Obviously, that Buffy reboot never materialized, and it’s hard to imagine any studio being able to extricate the show from its controversial creator.

Fortunately for fans, the Slayer universe has continued in print mediums, both with and without Buffy Summers. Dark Horse Comics published a canonical continuation of the series (many issues written by Joss Whedon) through 2018; BOOM! Studios staged its own reboot comic series starting in 2019. In recent years, there have also been several novels that spin-off from the original show: Kiersten White’s Slayer series and Kendare Blake’s In Every Generation series, as well as Lily Anderson’s Big Bad and the Spike-focused prequel Bloody Fool For Love by William Ritter. So while we likely won’t ever see Sarah Michelle Gellar raise her stake again, there are plenty of other ways to get your Buffy fix.