this is nothing but a train wreck waiting to happen but. . . even if Joss Whedon was doing this, it’d still have to be a reboot in my opinion. firstly, i can’t imagine SMG doing this in a million years. you’d never get David Boreanaz, probably not even James Marsters. Serenity didn’t work, cause noone wanted to see a movie that you couldn’t get the full enjoyment out of without seeing Firefly first, despite how good it was. AND Buffy had 7 years!! no way, we would never get a big screen continuation ever!
best we can hope that this ends up in development hell. leave our good Buffy memories intact
Eh, I don’t think the actors are necessarily what’s going to sink this thing. Let’s face it - Boreanz, SMG and most of the rest weren’t exactly world-class thespians. Hell, I couldn’t stand Angel on Buffy ( he was more tolerable when he got his spinoff ).
A re-boot can easily jettison every character but Buffy and perhaps a generic Watcher-type and still work. In fact it would almost certainly be the way to go.
I was actually surprised by the number of people who discovered the Firefly franchise through Serenity. Quite a few people seemed to enjoy it without prior exposure. But of course an anecdotal “quite a few” doesn’t by any means equal mass box office success :).
Remember that the studio only has rights to the movie script. Everything else developed from the TV show is off limits to them. They can ONLY remake the first movie script.
Of course, this means that there’s absolutely no reason to make this movie, or to see this movie. The business model seems to be:
People who see it out of morbid curiosity
People who see it because “Hey, I heard BtVS was pretty good, let’s rent this!”
People who say, “Hey, my daughter liked BtVS, so I’ll get this DVD for her.”
The writer of the proposed Buffy Reboot has been let go & the project seems to have stalled. (Not that we’d heard much about it since the original spasm of anger/boredom.) This article includes a witty Joss comment: