According to The Hollywood Reporter, Vertigo Entertainment is working with the director who owns the rights to the original 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie on a remake of the feature film. The new version would not use characters developed for the highly popular TV show of the same name that followed or its spinoff, Angel, but would instead be a remake or relaunch in the vein of Sci Fi Channel’s recent epic Battlestar Galactica.
Over my dead body.
I have no quarrel with the schlocky original movie, which starred Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Hilary Swank, Rutger Hauer, Luke Perry and David Arquette. It doesn’t match the production quality or rapier wit of the WB/UPN series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Anthony Stewart Head, Michelle Trachtenberg and, at times, David Boreanaz and Eliza Dushku. It’s a fun movie that pokes fun at horror movie cliches with a modern twist, and it’s so very ’90s.
But a Buffyverse without Joss Whedon, the man whose pen brought the magic to life? No thank you. Whedon wrote the original screenplay and was head writer on both the Buffy and Angel series, going on to capture imaginations with his powerful, character-driven storylines in Firefly and, more recently, Dollhouse. He owns Buffy — I don’t care who owns the rights to what. Unless he’s on board, you can Count me out. The stakes are just too high.
Is it asking too much for these creative types in Hollywood to come up with something original? Or at least to wait a generation before mining what’s already been done?
Now, if Vertigo and Fran Rubel Kuzui want to assemble all the appropriate players and bring the TV Buffy gang to the big screen, that would be most welcome. And if Gellar didn’t want to participate, it wouldn’t be the end of the world — the series finale made sure of that by ending the “one Slayer at a time” rule and activating all the potential Slayers simulaneously, so the possibilities are literally endless. And there’s always the rogue Slayer, Faith (Dushku), and Buffy’s sister Dawn (Trachtenberg).
But yet another continuity to keep straight? Fangs, but no fangs.
