Dove Cameron gives an update of The Powerpuff Girls pilot reshoot. The Powerpuff Girls began life as an animated series on Cartoon Network, running for eight years between 1998 and 2005. During its run, the Craig McCracken-developed show fostered overwhelming popularity, with fans praising its mix of cutesy and violent undertones, sense of fun, and playful take on the superhero genre. The show followed its protagonists – Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup – as they fought crime in the city of Townsville after being accidentally created in a lab by a Professor named Utonium. Although it’s been more than 15 years since the show ended, The Powerpuff Girls continues to be a pop-culture staple. Recently, it was announced that the show’s iconic superpowered trio would be brought to life for The CW, but the plan encountered several setbacks along the way.
Initially, with a pilot order from the Arrowverse network and cast filled with talented performers such as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Chloe Bennet (Blossom), The Descendants‘ Dove Cameron (Bubbles), and Broadway actress Yana Perrault (Buttercup), things appeared to be moving smoothly for the live-action reboot series. The show was fully on track for a fall debut, but when The CW took a look at the pilot, it found it to be “too campy” and simply “a miss.” The show was subsequently sent back to the drawing board to be reworked off-cycle and since then the show’s creative team, which includes CW mega-producer Greg Berlanti and Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody, have been working to straighten out the problematic aspects. Efforts to rewrite the script are also underway and Cameron has now given an update.
On Wednesday, while talking to E! News about her upcoming Apple TV+ series Schmigadoon!, Dove Cameron discussed the status of The Powerpuff Girls pilot reshoot. The 25-year-old actress said that there was nothing out of the ordinary about a pilot being retooled; in fact, her hit Disney Channel show, Liv & Maddie, had also started off differently than what it eventually became. Right now, Cameron feels there is so much hype around the reshoots because the source material is a beloved property, and this is something she and the creative team fully understand. That’s why everyone is working to make a better show, one that could go on for years, and one that honors the series that inspired it in the first place. Cameron refrained from directly commenting on how much work has been done on the pilot so far, but she did admit that The Powerpuff Girls creators were reworking the show as she talked.
“I think because there’s so much attention on [Powerpuff Girls], because of…how beloved the franchise is, people are kind of like looking for something crazy to happen when, like, nothing crazy happened. It’s just tonally, it’s something that you really have to get right. We shot an entire pilot. It’s pretty great. We like it. We think we can do better and we have the time and we’re going to go back and get it pitch-perfect so that, by the time we actually go to series, we’re shooting something and working off of something that we can hopefully work off of for years. Because you know, sometimes as an audience member, you watch a show and you’re like there was the pilot and then it became something else. And we don’t want to do that, we want to get it right straight out the gate. The team behind the show is reworking the pilot as we speak.”
This isn’t the first time that Cameron has defended the live-action show and openly discussed its revamp. Only recently, the star spoke about how everyone associated with the show was trying “to get it right for the audiences.” Even before that, Cameron had come out in support of The Powerpuff Girls pilot when its script was leaked. When fans got hold of the script, they were generally disappointed with its adult content and references to nudity, alcohol, and sex. Cameron, however, reassured them suggesting that since the pilot was being redeveloped, those elements would be redone too, and the franchise would only be revived in a way that it satisfies both, loyal audiences and the high stakes of the source material.
Cameron’s staunch faith in the ultimate success of The Powerpuff Girls, despite all the setbacks the show has seen, is a good sign of its progress. There is no denying that the initial reactions to the pilot, and its script, were largely underwhelming. but the good news is that the show isn’t sticking to them, rather it’s working its way toward quality presentation and a narrative that stands true to the storytelling of its highly stylized source material. Still, there hasn’t been any explicit update about the status of the reshoots as of yet, so fans will have to wait to see how much things have actually improved in the revamp. Thankfully, the wait won’t probably be too long as Cameron is keeping viewers in the loop, so she’ll likely update them right away as soon as the reshoots make significant headway.
