With Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to reprise her iconic role, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot seemed like a sure thing. However, fans were shocked when Hulu announced it would not move forward with the series. There are conflicting details on why that choice was made, but one possible explanation is that Buffy, whose name is in the title, was barely in the pilot.
Buffy’s Screentime
Variety has obtained the shooting draft for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, written by Nora and Lilla Zuckerman. In it, Buffy only appears at the very end and has only one line.
After spending most of the script in Sunnydale with the new hero Nova (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the action jumps to New York City, where a “woman in a pantsuit” walks into an insurance building. She takes her place among a field of cubicles, with her nameplate reading: Anne Summers. A colleague scolds her, saying she wouldn’t want to be late for the meeting, to which Buffy responds, “Nope… wouldn’t want that.” As she leaves for the meeting, her work computer is suddenly flooded with claims from Sunnydale, California. And that’s the end.
A more recent rewrite of the pilot did feature more Buffy, but by then the damage was done, as Hulu executives didn’t think the project was salvageable. Did they make a mistake by passing on the project? Had the series moved forward, we obviously would have seen more of Buffy, but her lack of screentime in the reboot pilot did seem to be a sore point.
Gellar Doesn’t Want the Pilot to Leak
While some fans hope the pilot leaks online so they can see something from the project, Gellar hopes it doesn’t.
“I actually hope it doesn’t because then everyone’s going to have an opinion on this and that, and pilots are not finished,” Gellar told Evan Real on SiriusXM’s Page Six Radio (via THR). “It wasn’t done, right? It’s not like we did a season and finished it and then they shelved it. It’s not like when they made the Batgirl movie and didn’t [release] it. That movie was finished. You make a pilot — and I want to clarify this — we made a pilot [first instead of a full season] on purpose because there’s some new characters and you want to see how it goes. There are things you learn from it, and there are things you fix. Usually, [the first version of a] pilot doesn’t air … it’s a learning tool. The original Buffy pilot [had] nothing to do with the show. It was a different Willow. It was a very different show. But those are learning tools and that’s what a pilot is.“
Gellar also hopes fans avoid reading the script making the rounds for the same reason. “I’ve seen a version of the script out there,” she said. “It’s not actually correct. That stuff is really unfortunate and I ask fans if you see scripts — if you see it leaked — don’t watch it because you’re not getting our vision and all of that.“
