Live-Action Powerpuff Girls, Diggle's Justice U Among Pre-Nexstar Projects No Longer in Development at The CW
Powerpuff is officially powered down.
A live-action take on the Powerpuff Girls is no longer being redeveloped at The CW, TVLine has confirmed. The same goes for the Arrowverse offshoot Justice U, a female-led Zorro series, Jake Chang (which was to be based on a new-ish Archie Comics character), or any other prospective series left over from former CW president Mark Pedowitz’s regime.
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“We’ve already given those back to the studios,” Brad Schwartz, The CW’s President of Entertainment, told TVLine after the network’s Thursday morning Upfront presentation, “so they’re free to develop those and sell them anywhere.”
Schwartz had just detailed for the press a development slate curated by Nexstar, The CW’s owner of the last seven months, which includes a Librarians sequel series, The Great American Bakeover (in which Nancy Birtwhistle makes over struggling bakeries), the self-explanatory Patti Stanger: Millionaire Matchmaker, and The Force (an unscripted procedural à la COPS).
Of the abandoned projects from Pedowitz’s tenure at The CW, a pilot for Powerpuff — starring Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, Donald Faison and others — was filmed in early 2021, but it wasn’t picked up to series.
“Sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” Pedowitz explained to reporters in May 2021. “Tonally, it might have felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might have. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And in this case, we felt like, ‘Let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.’”
In Justice U, David Ramsey would have reprised his role as Arrow‘s John Diggle, who after spending years fighting alongside masked heroes “embarks on a new mission to recruit five young meta humans to live undercover as freshmen at a prestigious university.” As recently as October, Ramsey had told TVLine, “we’re on the second draft of a script, and we just closed the deal on a writer…. It’s still in development, and we’re moving forward.”
The female-led Zorro series, which hails from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids) and writer-director Rebecca Rodriguez (Snowpiercer, Doom Patrol), had previously been pursued/bailed on at NBC. It was put into development at The CW in February 2022, the same time as Gotham Knights, Walker Independence and The Winchesters (all of which got green lights).
Lastly, Jake Chang was put into development last June, and was described as is an Asian-American–led mystery following the titular 16-year-old private investigator as he navigates the diverse worlds of his ever-gentrifying home of Chinatown.
TVLine has reached out to the respective studios behind each of the above for comment on their statuses.
Which of these projects are you saddest to see fall by the wayside?
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