Everything We Know About The Canceled Live-Action Reboot

The “gritty young-adult remake” was all the rage back in 2020. The success of “Riverdale” had opened the floodgates, leading to similar but perhaps less well-thought-out series like Netflix’s “Fate: The Winx Saga” (adapting the early 2000s cartoon “Winx Club”) and DC’s “Titans” (that’s right, Robin is a straight-up murderer now). Some, like “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” (a reboot of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”), were more successful than others. But the gold rush to find the next nostalgic children’s property to darkify was on, so it was both baffling and entirely unsurprising when news broke of a gritty, live-action reboot of “The Powerpuff Girls” being announced at The CW.

The venue was the only thing that made that wild pitch somewhat easier to swallow. As the home of “Riverdale,” The CW was effectively ground zero for the “What if Ben 10 went to Euphoria High?” approach to TV writing. Even still, the chosen subject felt a bit too out of left field for the network’s vivid brand of teen angst, and the world watched with bated breath.

In the end, we never got that gritty, live-action “Powerpuff Girls” reboot, dubbed simply “Powerpuff” (oh yes, so much more mature) prior to its cancellation in 2023. Before that point, though, the series went a lot farther than you might expect, with full casting and a complete pilot written and filmed. Clearly, the result was off the mark.

Here’s everything we know about what went wrong with the live-action “Powerpuff Girls” show.

When news of the live-action “Powerpuff Girls” series broke in August 2020, it came with a basic series pitch and a few names attached on the creative side — namely, “iZombie” and “Sleepy Hollow” alum Heather Regnier and “Juno” scribe Diablo Cody as the heads of the project. The logline, as reported by Variety at the time, described the superhero trio as “disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting.” A new, grave threat forces them to consider reuniting, despite complicated feelings about their upbringings.

You can sort of see the vision under Cody, whose credits, apart from “Juno,” include other subversive young adult stories like “Jennifer’s Body” and, in the years since “Powerpuff” fell apart, “Lisa Frankenstein.” In addition to the two creative leads, Greg Berlanti, mastermind of The CW’s hugely popular Arrowverse franchise of DC superhero shows, was also attached as an EP, with Warner Bros. Television producing. If you look at the series as a blend of the Arrowverse superhero model and the teen disgruntlement of “Riverdale” — two of the biggest things the network had going at the time — it’s not hard to see why a project that otherwise sounds preposterous might have gotten real support.

Original series creator Craig McCracken was not involved, though he did tell SYFY that he was curious about the dark and gritty version. “”The initial concept of Powerpuff Girls was the idea that they were little kids being superheroes, so the fact that they’re making them grow up, that sort of changes that initial concept,” he said. Famed animator Genndy Tartakovsky, who also worked on the original cartoon, told ComicBook.com at the time that the idea was “certainly interesting,” while also expressing some trepidation about the transition to a live-action format.

With the base creative team set out at the show’s announcement, casting news trickled in gradually from there. The trio of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup would be played by “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” fan favorite Chloe Bennet, Disney Channel veteran Dove Cameron, and musician Yana Perrault, respectively. Donald Faison, aka Turk from “Scrubs,” was cast as Professor Utonium, the creator of the Powerpuff Girls in the original cartoon. Other castings included Robyn Lively as original series character Sara Bellum and Nicholas Podany as the son of Mojo Jojo, the main villain from the cartoon.

All told, it was a fairly star-studded cast for such a wacky pitch, with several of the key actors bringing some recent clout from other prominent genre shows. Add in the superhero TV rep of the Arrowverse series, and you had an odd, seemingly decently compelling framework for … something. The bigger issues came once the actual material for the show started coming out.

A full pilot for the series was produced, and while it never saw the light of day, both the script and unreleased trailer were eventually leaked, giving the Internet plenty of material to look through. And, well, it’s not exactly great.

At the risk of being overly mean, the script reads like the worst, most clichéd version of exactly what you’d imagine when given the pitch. After accidentally killing Mojo Jojo (more normal guy than monkey this time, though there’s some weirdness there too) during a fight as teenagers, Blossom quits the team, and her sisters follow suit. We catch up with them as Blossom’s turning 25, living a pretty ordinary life at a biotech company. Buttercup is working as a firefighter, while Bubbles lives as a C-tier celebrity grifter after “two stints in rehab and three failed reality show pilots.”

So, yeah, it was that kind of show.

The script is littered with heavy-handed, halfhearted jokes about anti-wokeness, drug use, casual sex, and mental illness. Professor Utonium, referred to primarily as “Drake” in this version, has “random hookups” with “science groupies” and “beaker bunnies.” We hear talk of a “once fringe group of Anti-Powerpuff Girls activists.” Phone sex, xanax, you name it, all the CW signifiers are here.

By the end of the pilot, a reunion back in Townsville and a new bit of danger force the sisters to join forces again. Of course, they decide to stay there and reform the old group. Hilarious antics ensue, etc.

Those less enthused by the angling of the “Powerpuff” pilot script might assume that the series was canceled simply because of bad material. Of course, things are always more complicated, but the perceived quality of the pilot certainly played a role, and rewrites were announced.

“In this case, the pilot didn’t work,” Mark Pedowitz, then-CEO of The CW, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “Because we see enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. It may have felt a little too campy and not rooted in reality.” Striking the right tonal balance certainly seemed to be a challenge, with the leaked material presenting a sort of tongue-in-cheek ouroboros absent the necessary grounding that made some of the network’s other genre series work. The intention was still to retool the project, but just a few months after Pedowitz spoke with THR, the show lost its star when Chloe Bennet withdrew due to a scheduling conflict.

From there, “Powerpuff” entered limbo. In 2022, the majority ownership of The CW shifted when Nexstar Media Group acquired a 75% stake in the network, and subsequent changes in management led to an official cancellation in 2023. While the project was still theoretically possible at Warner Bros. with a different distributor attached, that ship eventually sailed as well.