Diablo Cody says she’s sorry her live-action POWERPUFF GIRLS was scrapped: ‘We wanted to do something a little weird’

Last summer it was announced that the live-action Super Goodies the series that was in the works at The CW had been scrapped. The Powerpuff Girls would reach Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, “who were once little American superheroes but are now disillusioned twenty-somethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime-fighting. Will they agree to reunite now when the world needs them more than ever?

The cast included Agents of SHIELD‘S Chloe Bennett like Fiore, Descendants‘ Dove Cameron as Broadway veteran Bubbles Yana Perrault like Buttercup, and Scrub‘ Donald Faison in the role of Professor Utonio.

Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody (Juno) was the project’s writer, and expressed her sadness over the show’s dissolution in a recent interview with The Wrap, where she said:

“Honestly there were a lot of problems. It’s a shame. I was really sorry about this. Heather Regnier and I, who created it together, were very, very excited about that show. But it just didn’t work. And sometimes things just don’t work out. I mean, to be honest, most of the time things don’t work out that way.

Little was known about the plot of Powerpuff Girlsbeyond the logline shared above, but as it turns out, it was about more than simply losing their youth.

“So the idea was that the Powerpuff Girls were adults, and they were really disillusioned because they felt like they were almost exploited, as child stars, when they were young superheroes. And so it had been years since they really used their powers. And then Townsville was under attack again and they realized they had to overcome their differences and come together.”

Cody notes that it was “fun” to write about the trio at this age and figure out how they would handle Gen Z issues, but that it made things more difficult, in terms of getting the show out of the gate.

“I think, in general, making the Powerpuff Girls adults was a challenge, because it probably would have been easier to just do a live-action adaptation of the existing show. But we wanted to do something strange.”

It seems the quirk didn’t translate for network executives as, in 2021, The CW’s then-president and CEO Mark Pedowitz said the pilot filmed “seemed a little too campy.” Cody added that, as with any beloved piece of IP, “there’s fan service involved” and trying to make fans of the original happy “definitely adds a whole layer of difficulty” — one that was “difficult” to deal with .

As for that script supposedly leaked online? The writer was not aware of this at the time of this conversation, but she would sense that there were many versions of her and Regnier’s scripts.

Cody said:

“It’s likely that there are so many drafts and so many different versions of the scripts by the time they go into production, that it’s possible that what leaked was maybe… I mean, I guess it could have been the shooting script, but it also could have just been a leftover from development. I don’t know. Because I also wrote, I wrote a half-hour version, I wrote a one-hour version, it was on a streamer, then it was on The CW. So it’s like there are many iterations of Powerpuff Girls live.

That said, Cody can see a future in live-action Super Goodies appears on screens: There’s already an animated reboot in the works, Cody simply has nothing to do with it.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a live-action Powerpuff Girls show at some point, but they probably won’t hire me to do it again.”

Cody’s most recent project, the upcoming hilarious horror romantic comedy Lisa Frankensteinwill be released in theaters on February 9th.