The CW to rework that gritty Powerpuff Girls pilot that everyone seemed so concerned about
It didn’t really sound as bad as it could’ve (or maybe should’ve), but The CW’s pilot for a gritty reboot of The Powerpuff Girls—which would’ve featured the eponymous superheroes as jaded twentysomethings who had been damaged in various ways by their crime-fighting childhoods—will not be going forward yet. Rather than being outright canceled, though, Variety says the network is going to rework the project in some way and re-shoot the pilot “off-cycle,” meaning it won’t be a part of The CW’s regular fall season but could still be picked up in the future.
The four members of the main cast (Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, and Donald Faison) are still attached, and “the remainder of the cast and the creative team behind the show” will also be sticking around, so this basically means that they’re all getting an opportunity to redo their work and come up with something better. We don’t know what that means, having not seen the original pilot, but everyone on the internet was awfully concerned about how this was going to work on a tonal level, so maybe The CW is recalibrating things because of that.
This is kind of pilot redo is relatively rare in the TV world, though some of the biggest TV shows in history had to reshoot their pilots before figuring things out (Game Of Thrones and Seinfeld being too famous examples), so maybe this means The CW’s Powerpuff Girls will end up being one of the best shows ever made? That’s pretty unlikely, but when you’re already at “gritty live-action Powerpuff Girls,” you might as well aim for the stars.
The series, if it ever does make it that far, will star Bennet as Blossom (the pink Powerpuff Girl), Cameron as Bubbles (the blue one), Perrault as Buttercup (the green one), and Faison as Professor Utonium (their dad/creator). Nicholas Podany, who played Harry Potter’s son in the Broadway production of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, was also set to appear as the son of Powerpuff Girls villain Mojo Jojo.