What strikes you first is the timing of it all. Sarah Michelle Gellar was about to step on stage at SXSW to celebrate the premiere of a film she'd worked hard on. Her collaborator, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, was mere days away from sitting in an auditorium full of her peers as a best director nominee for her latest picture. And then the call came: no, Disney had decided, the Buffy reboot was dead.
This is the strange story of Buffy: New Sunnydale, a project that felt almost designed to work. Gellar returning as the iconic slayer she made famous in the 1990s. Zhao, a self-professed lifelong fan of the original series, bringing her acclaimed sensibility to the material. A fresh script from Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, the writers behind the acclaimed series Poker Face. And yet, a year into development, on March 14, 2026, Hulu announced it had decided not to move forward with the project.
The sequence of events that led to this moment reveals something more troubling than a simple creative disagreement. After reviewing the pilot, Hulu said the show felt "too young" and "too small." So the writers went back to work. Nora and Lilla Zuckerman then created a more adult 90-minute rewrite with greater focus on Buffy. Sources say 20th Television and Searchlight Television responded positively to the revised script. The studios that would produce the show thought they had salvaged it.
Then came Friday evening. At 6 p.m., Disney Television Group President Craig Erwich, who oversees Hulu Originals, called stakeholders to inform them that the project was not moving forward. No one had expected it. The timing could not have been worse; Gellar was at SXSW for the premiere of Ready or Not 2, produced by Searchlight, and Zhao was attending Oscar weekend events leading to Sunday's Academy Awards, where her latest movie Hamnet had eight nominations including for her as a director.
Hours later, Gellar took to Instagram to share the news herself, determined the fans would hear it from her first. In subsequent interviews, she articulated what felt like betrayal. "We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn't for him," she said. "That's very hard when you're taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn't watch it."
While Gellar declined to name the executive, Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich was the ultimate decision-maker, sources confirm. Following Disney's Monday reorganisation, Erwich now also oversees 20th Television—the studio behind the reboot—meaning it's up to him to decide if Buffy: New Sunnydale could live on elsewhere after Hulu's pass.
The irony cuts deeper still. Buffy was a beloved 1990s cult classic created by Joss Whedon that ran for seven seasons. Zhao was precisely the kind of filmmaker studios hire to revitalise intellectual property: her previous film, Nomadland, won the Academy Award for best picture. Yet some suggested Erwich was referring to the fact that he wasn't the demographic for the series when he said that it "wasn't for him." Still, those involved disagreed with that characterisation.
The reasons for the final pass remain opaque. Some say Hulu suggested that the rewritten version of the project was too expensive to shoot. Others indicate that it still fell short of the high bar set by the original series. One source close to the project compared the situation to completing a $3 million renovation only to find out that the house has foundation issues. "Instead of fixing the foundation, you just walk away," the person said about Hulu's decision.
The decision also raises questions about institutional decision-making at a time when streaming executives face intense pressure to justify spending. Disney would have preferred to hold off on the revelation until after the Oscars to handle the situation more delicately. The fact that the announcement happened at all—and the manner in which it unfolded—suggests the kind of administrative miscalculation that happens when timelines collide with poor judgment about human consequence.
Gellar was magnanimous in her broader message to fans, insisting that the cancellation changes nothing about the original series' legacy. Yet her frustration was evident. "The fans, they were the only reason we were doing this show in the first place," she said. "We were doing it because everybody loves it. So how do you do a show that's beloved with someone that doesn't love it?"
As Deadline reported, the hope is to get another take on the Buffy IP up and running within the next couple of years. But that hope seems fragile now. What remains is the peculiar tragedy of a project that was, by most measures, salvaged—only to be discarded anyway.