The Powerpuff Girls’s next rescue mission has hit a snag. A day after the live-action reboot’s edgy script reportedly leaked on Twitter, the CW confirmed that its adaptation of Craig McCracken‘s popular animated series is being re-imagined. “The reason we do pilots is, sometimes things miss,” CW’s chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz said during the show’s upfront press call on Tuesday, according to Deadline. “We believe in the cast and in [writers Diablo Cody and Heather Regnier] and [executive producer Greg Berlanti] and studio Warner Bros. In this case, the pilot didn’t work.”
The scrapped pilot starred Chloe Bennett as Blossom, Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and Yana Perrault as Buttercup. That trio and the show’s writers are all on board to continue with the next Powerpuff iteration, which will premiere at some point after the 2021-2022 fall schedule. “Because we see enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot,” Pedowitz explained. “It may have felt a little too campy and not rooted in reality.”
He may have been referring to a version of the alleged script that made the Twitter rounds on Monday. In that version, which Pedowitz did not directly comment on, Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup take nudes, have marathon sex (with other super-powered people, presumably), and refer to life as “one big hate boner.” Pedowitz wouldn’t confirm or deny that the leaked excerpts belonged to CW’s project, claiming he hadn’t seen the tweets prior to his press call.
Still, Pedowitz maintained that he, Cody, Regnier, and director/executive producer Maggie Kiley wouldn’t stop efforts to depict the Powerpuff Girls as world-weary twenty-somethings. “You learn things when you test things out,” he continued. “We felt, ‘Let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.’ This is a powerful property, it engaged a lot of interest, and we want to get it right.”
Perhaps the main problem with adapting Powerpuff is that the characters are not girls, but not yet women? Awaiting word from Britney Spears in the meantime.
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