Imagining Riverdale without Cole Sprouse, Lili Reinhart, K.J. Apa, Camila Mendes, Madelaine Petsch and all the others we love is a thought that genuinely wrecks our souls. “Why are you putting the idea of a Sprouse-less Archie adaption in our minds?” you ask. Uh, maybe you should sit down first.

Alright, here it goes. Before Riverdale aired, it was actually reported that an Archie-inspired movie was once a possibility – which like, totally would’ve squashed the chances of Riverdale ever being created in the first place. But like, no one seems to talk about this – so naturally, we just had to bring this information to light… especially now that we know what we would have been missing out on. Oh yeah, and they wanted the movie to be about (wait for it) time travel.

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What a sin that would’ve been, right? This world may be twisted, but luckily it’s not that twisted. Phew. Don’t get us wrong or anything. This so-called sci-fi production would have been just lovely, we’re sure. But to think of Riverdale being anything other than what it is now is an image too terrible to taint our Bughead-obsessed minds with.

Riverdale creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa spilled, “Our first thought had been to do an Archie movie. We partnered with some producers and we had gone to see Perks of Being a Wallflower which I loved. So the pitch was a slice of life coming-of-age movie which we took around to many places and a lot of the studios really loved the pitch and our characters.”

After some no’s, Warner Bros. ultimately bought their pitch.

“A few weeks go by and the contracts are sorted out and we get a phone call that one of the vice presidents at Warner Bros., who had not been in the pitch would like to have a kick-off meeting. He was like, ‘I want to get in on the ground floor.’ We go to the kick-off meeting and he said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about this and I think you guys need to do something a little more high-concept, a little bigger than just a coming-of-age show. I want you to think about time travel. Like Archie traveling through time.'”

Wait, it gets weirder…

jughead i'm weird

Roberto continued, “[The vice president at Warner Bros.] said, ‘It seems like you don’t like the time travel thing. I’ve got another thing: portals. Portals are huge. This is a portal to another dimension,'” Roberto went on to recall. “And then this was the greatest one which I actually think is a funny idea: he was like, ‘What if Louis C.K. is Archie?’ We were like, ‘We hear you … but we’re going to regroup.'”

So yeah, that was a lot to work with. For the next year, there was really no movement on the project. Finally, they scraped the whole movie thing and hit the ground running with the show that we now know and love as Riverdale.

And voilà – a fandom was born.

Watch: See the Riverdale Cast Compared to Their Archie Characters

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