Earlier this week it was revealed that The CW has decided to scrap the first pilot of their live-action Powerpuff Girls series and rework the project, with the creative team and main cast including Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, and Donald Faison still attached to the retooled pilot. Now, in a recent interview with TVLine, The CW chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz has finally opened up about the still-in-development Powerpuff series, explaining the reason why they came up with the decision of reworking the whole pilot.
“Sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” Pedowitz said. “We believe in the cast completely, we believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier], the writers, and we believe in the auspices of [executive producer] Greg Berlanti and Warner [Bros.] Studios. In this case, the pilot didn’t work. But because we see enough elements in there, we’re going to give it another shot. We didn’t want to go forward with what we had.”
He also went on to reveal that the first version of the pilot, which was shot earlier this year, just didn’t work and “felt a little too campy,” for them.
“Tonally, it might have felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might have,” he explained. “But again, you learn things when you test things out. And in this case, we felt like, ‘Let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.’”
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The Powerpuff Girls was created by Craig McCracken and debuted in 1998, centering on Professor Utonium as, in an attempt to create the perfect little girl, ends up creating the titular trio Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup from the combination of sugar, spice, everything nice and the mysterious Chemical X. Powerpuff centers on the titular trio as disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having spent their entire childhood fighting crime and are struggling to reunite as the world needs them more than ever.
Click here to purchase the Complete Series set of the 1998 animated hit!
The live-action project is still being led by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. alums Chloe Bennet and DoveCameron along with Yana Perrault, who are portraying the roles of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, respectively, as well as Scrubs alum Donald Faison as Professor Drake Utonium, Nicholas Podany (Hart of Dixie) as Mojo Jojo’s son, and Tom Kenny reprising his role as narrator.
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The first Powerpuff pilot was written and executive produced by Heather Regnier (iZombie) and Diablo Cody (Jennifer’s Body), who will both pen the rewrite for the new pilot. Executive producers are Regnier and Cody, Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and David Madden via Berlanti Productions with Warner Bros. Television set to produce the project. Maggie Kiler has also boarded the pilot to serve as the director.
