Given how often she died during the run of the original series, you might be forgiven for thinking Buffy Summers was basically impossible to put down for good. Turns out, though, that you don’t need to be a vampire or a big glowing energy rift thingy to put the Slayer in the ground: Just a streaming service unhappy with the pilot for a planned revival of the classic monster-hunting series.
This is per no less a source than Sarah Michelle Gellar herself, who popped up on Instagram today to break the news. Thanking pilot director Chloé Zhao—who’s up for multiple Oscars this weekend for her film Hamnet—for helping to remind her how much she loves the character she played for seven seasons in the ’90s and 2000s, Gellar revealed that Hulu had passed on New Sunnydale, the revival project she was starring in with Ryan Kiera Armstrong.
Said pilot was written by Poker Face alums Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, and directed by Zhao, who was enough of a Buffy mega-nerd that she reportedly celebrated wrapping on the pilot by gifting Gellar with a new version of her old “Class Protector” trophy from the original series. Hulu, however, apparently wasn’t wild about the pilot, with Deadline reporting on sources calling the result “not perfect,” and expressing concerns about whether Zhao’s style blended well with the monster-hunting mayhem. There was apparently some talk of trying to recut or rework the pilot into something more sustainable, but the Disney-owned streamer ultimately decided to pull the plug on the project. (That being said, Deadline also notes that Hulu is still interested in the franchise as a whole, so we may all be back here in a year, contemplating a new Buffy revival, now with less of that distracting Oscars street cred.)
Gellar, at least, is stiff-upper-lipping it: She ended her Instagram message reminding fans that, “If the apocalypse comes… you can still beep me.”
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