Powerpuff: How Was That Live-Action Reboot Even a Real Thing?

On Thursday, fans of The CW, The Powerpuff Girls, and all things television what-might-have-been got a little treat when the trailer for The CW’s cancelled live-action Powerpuff series leaked online. If you read that sentence and had a moment where you went “wait, what?” that’s understandable and you are in the right place. Back in 2021, The CW ordered and shot a pilot for a live action Powerpuff series starring Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, and Yana Perrault as the titular Powerpuff Girls with Donald Faison playing their father/creator. Unfortunately, the series never made it to screen and other than a couple of set photos and one official image shared by the network, fans never got to see anything from the series, leaving it to fade from memory.

Until now. The leak of the trailer has given viewers a glimpse of what the series might have been highlighting a campy, slightly bizarre, and definitely more mature take on the beloved cartoon as it followed Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles as adults estranged from their father having abandoned heroics after a childhood of being in the spotlight and a tragic, fatal mistake led to tragedy. While the trailer reveals a tone that was certainly a departure from what fans might have expected — and is even a bit on the cringe side — there’s something clever in its self-aware satirical nature that has us wondering how we got here — and what the series might have been.

2020: A Live-Action Powerpuff Series Heads Into Development

It all starts back in 2020. That’s when it was first reported that a live-action take on the popular Cartoon Network cartoon was in development at The CW by Heather Regnier and Diablo Cody. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and David Madden were set to executive produce for Berlanti Productions with Warner Bros. Television producing the series. The news was met with some big reactions from fans of the original animated series and that only grew when, in early 2021 — just a few months after news that the series was in development — The CW gave the live action Powerpuff Girls project a pilot order. At that point, we got a bit more information about the series as well, which was then described as following the girls as “disillusioned twentysomethings who regret spending their youth fighting criminals. The question lingers of whether they can swallow their resentment long enough to come back together and save the world when it needs them most.”

[RELATED: Powerpuff Girls Live-Action Trailer Leaks (And It’s Even Weirder Than You Think)]

Soon after the announcement that the series was getting a pilot order, fans got even more major news when casting for the series was announced. It was announced that Cameron would play Bubbles, Bennet would play Blossom, and Perrault would play Buttercup. It was also confirmed that Regnier and Cody would be writing the pilot script with Maggi Kiley directing. Additional casting, including Faison as Professor Utonium and Nicholas Podany as Mojo Jojo’s son, was announced, as was a title change to simply Powerpuff. Announcements of Robyn Lively as Sara Bellum and Tom Kenny as Narrator soon followed.

2021: Trouble in Townsville

However, while casting came together and we started getting glimpses of the series through set photos and the first official looks from The CW, in 2021 we also got our first signs of trouble when it was announced that the pilot was being redeveloped and reshot. At the time, the then-network president Mark Pedowitz explained that the pilot as it stood was a “miss” and they simply wanted to give it another shot, citing that it was just “too campy”.

“The reason you do pilots is because, sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” he said at the time. “We believe in the cast completely. We believe in Diablo and Heather, the writers. We believe in the auspices of Greg Berlanti and Warner [Bros. TV] studios.”

“In this case, the pilot didn’t work,” Pedowitz continued. “But because we see there’s enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. So, that’s why we didn’t want to go forward with what we had. Tonally, it might have felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And so, in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.”

A few months later, the series was dealt another blow when it was announced that Bennet was exiting the series despite having previously been announced to be returning for the reworked pilot. It was reported at the time that Bennet’s departure was due to scheduling conflicts and that a replacement would be forthcoming. However, no replacement was ever announced.

2023: The End of the Road

After Bennet’s departure from Powerpuff, updates on the project were few and far between. In May 2022, an update surfaced that claimed the show was still “in some stage of development but otherwise did not elaborate. Another update that July confirmed that the series was still in active development at that time. However, in May 2023, The CW was deep in changes at the network following its acquisition by Nexstar and it was reported that The CW was no longer pursuing any of its prospective series — including Powerpuff. The series were given back to their respective studios at that time so they could be developed and sold elsewhere.

For Powerpuff, that ultimately marked the end of the road. In July 2023 it was announced that Powerpuff was officially no longer in development at Warner Bros. TV. Looking back on it, Cameron later said that shooting the pilot was one of the “most fun things” and that she loved what they had done.

“Let me just say that what we shot, I loved, and that was one of the most fun things, and I think whatever you thought it was gonna be, it wasn’t gonna be that, and it was very campy and very sexy and very fun, and I love Diablo Cody,” Cameron said.

So, What Happened?

So, what happened? While we will never know all of the background details of things, a major factor appears to be The CW’s sale to Nexstar. While it was announced that Powerpuff was having its pilot reworked in 2021, by early 2022 it was announced that WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS were exploring selling either a majority stake or all of The CW to Nexstar Media Group. In May of 2022, the network unleashed something of a cancellation bloodbath, cancelling ten shows in short order including everything from one-season series and long-running series as well. The network also scrapped its in-development series — including Powerpuff — at that time. A few months later, Nexstar officially owned The CW, shifting the network’s programming to low-cost acquired programming and unscripted programming, such as sports and game shows. It is very likely that the shift in focus at the network during the transition was a major factor in Powerpuff’s fate – even beyond the adjustments that the pilot needed.

We may never know what Powerpuff would have ultimately been.  Powerpuff certainly appears to have been nothing like what fans thought it was going to be. While the pilot did appear to lean very heavily into campiness – and Cody herself even said in an interview that they had quite a few challenges making things more mature rather than a straight adaptation from the animated series – there were also elements that could have made for interesting explorations had the series been given a chance. The series could have made for an interesting way to examine the impact of children being in the spotlight – albeit as superheroes and not as performers in this case – as well as would have been a fun way to dive into certain superhero tropes. Had the pilot and the series found its footing, Powerpuff could have been something really special.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.