Many of us were surprised by Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Saturday post that Hulu would not be moving forward with their Chloé Zhao-directed “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot — and now she’s taking aim at Disney’s top brass.
Gellar is now telling People that she received the call with the news right before she was about to take the stage at the SXSW Film Festival premiere of “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” on Friday.
No one saw this coming, including the head of Searchlight. 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 [Zhao] 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.
What an awkward coincidence, then, that Searchlight produces both “Ready or Not 2” and the new “Buffy” reboot for Hulu. Gellar seems to be laying the blame for the cancellation on one particular 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. That’s very hard when you’re taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it
The cancellation came after Zhao, a self-professed Buffy fan, had already shot the 90-minute pilot episode last fall, from a script written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman (“Poker Face”).
After Gellar’s social media post announcing that the reboot had been canceled, Disney sources quickly went to Deadline, telling the trade that the pilot was “not perfect,” suggesting that Zhao’s creative sensibility might not have been the ideal fit for the reboot.
Now, whether Gellar and Zhao will be able to shop the reboot around to other networks remains to be seen, although I doubt that will be possible given that Disney rarely, if ever, gives up the rights to any IP it owns. The whole thing is probably dead.