Four years ago, the announcement of a live-action, adult-oriented Powerpuff Girls CW series was met with a resounding…why? Although the series was axed before seeing the light of day, a scrapped trailer has now leaked online, and we’re still asking why anyone thought this was a good idea.
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In 2021, the CW ordered a pilot to test out the live-action reboot titled Powerpuff. On paper, the series had promise, even if the ‘mature cartoon’ concept was derivative of the network’s hit show Riverdale. It starred Chloe Bennet as Blossom, Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and Yana Perrault as Buttercup, with Donald Faison supporting as the girl’s father/creator Professor Drake Utonium. The CW even booked Diablo Cody to pen the script.
The series itself is another story. On Thursday, the YouTube channel Lost Media Busters leaked a trailer, and Warner Bros subsequently took it down—for good reason, it turns out.
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A CW source confirmed to Variety that the footage in the trailer is real, but a trailer was never officially put together before cancellation. The leaked trailer may have been a proof from a third party studio contracted by the CW or it may be a fan edit.
However the trailer came to be, the Internet is split between disbelief at how bad the show looks and a sick yearning for the train wreck that could have been.
Because Warner Bros is currently working hard to squash all leaks, here’s the gist. The series starts much like the original cartoon, with the girls being created in a lab and becoming famous superheroes in the town of Townsville. At one point, their fame culminates in the actual Cartoon Network series, which the girls watch and Buttercup complains has been “completely whitewashed.”
But after they accidentally get the mayor Mojo (in reference to the cartoon’s intelligent ape supervillain Mojo Jojo) killed, the girls become outcasts and leave Townsville. Blossom runs away somewhere, Buttercup becomes a firefighter, and Bubbles tries to make it in Hollywood. Eventually, the three return as adults to Townsville where they encounter Mojo’s son Jojo (Nicholas Podany), the new mayor and apparent love interest to Blossom.
All in all, the trailer is a mishmash of edgy adult ‘humor’ and terrible CGI. A notable absence from the trailer is the campy genderqueer supervillain HIM, but that might be for the best.
At the time of the show’s cancellation, CW chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz explained that there was a simple reason the world never saw this trailer. “The reason you do pilots is because sometimes things miss,” he said, “and this was just a miss.”
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