That cheer you may have heard about a week ago wasn’t due to the holidays, it was the collective applause for millions of Joss Whedon fans everywhere for yet another setback on the remake train for one of sci-fi geeks most cherished properties. The inexplicably Whedon-less Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot has been dwelling (and rightfully so) in Development Hell for the past few years. The much-maligned silver screen reboot of the beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise (yes an uber-campy film, bad-ass show complete with equally bad-ass spin-off and graphic novel series counts as a franchise in my book) has hit another snag.
Hero Complex has reported today that the Buffy reboot has sacked its most recent screenwriter, Whit Anderson who handed in a script earlier this summer that studio heads over at Warner Brothers ultimately feeling that “in the end there just wasn’t enough on the page.” The body count for this thing seems to be giving the ill-conceived Broadway show, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark a run for its money.
Whedon himself has had his hands full helming a different treasured ensemble, next summer’s tentpole action flick, The Avengers. He has gone on the record himself, taking several well deserved pot shots at the reboot and his none too deliberate exclusion from the project has had this to say:
“This is a sad, sad reflection on our times,” Whedon said last November when that deal was announced, “when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths — just because they can’t think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself.”
While Buffy and Whedon fans everywhere cannot deny that there’s life in the old gal yet, this is one project I think that we’d all just as soon see give up the ghost. However, knowing Hollywood’s current trend of remaking popular franchises, I think that I can safely predict that this in not the last we hear of Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyre.
