'Powerpuff Girls' Series Cancelled: What Went Wrong?

It may be a while before Powerpuff Girls fans take their trip to the city of Townsville. The live-action CW series initially starring Dove Cameron, Chloe Bennet and Yana Perrault was not picked up for the networks’ Fall 2021 schedule. In May 2023, the network announced that it had been scrapped overall.

Keep reading for everything we know.

The ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Initial Announcement

News that Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup were headed back to TV was first reported by Deadline in August 2020. “The Powerpuff Girls used to be America’s pint-sized superheroes. Now they’re disillusioned 20-somethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting. Will they agree to reunite now that the world needs them more than ever?” the series’ description read at the time. In March 2021, it was announced that Dove, Chloe and Yana were cast as the three crime-fighting sisters with Donald Faison as Professor Utonium and Nicholas Podany as Mojo Jojo.

“We have the most incredible chemistry, which is so lucky because you never know,” Dove told POPSUGAR following her casting news. “We feel like sisters already. We’re all so geeked to be a part of this. We all feel so lucky, and we’re in touch every day. We talk every day. We send voice notes constantly. It’s moving quickly, and it’s real, it’s happening.”

Per the Descendants alum’s social media post, the cast filmed the show’s pilot episode throughout the month of April 2021. At the time, The CW also shared a first look at the series.

“I’m so excited to be in jeans and a little blue tank top and then levitate and zoom out of a window,” Dove told NYLON in a separate interview at the time. “But also specifically getting to play the Powerpuff Girls. I grew up without cable and I even knew what the Powerpuff Girls were. I’m a freak for them.”

What Happened to the ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Show?

Nearly a month after filming the show’s first episode, it was reported that the show was being reworked for the network. Variety noted that the show’s leads “remain attached to the project” with plans to “film a new pilot for the series off-cycle.” Then, Mark Pedowitz, The CW president and CEO, explained why they decided to hold off on the show during a May 2021 conversation with reporters.

“The reason you do pilots is because sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” he said, per Variety, noting that the network believes in the cast, crew and studio. “In this case, the pilot didn’t work.”

Scroll through our gallery for everything we know about what went wrong with Powerpuff.

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What Dove Said

Dove offered fans a Powerpuff Girls update in June 2021. “I can’t speak on it yet because they are still changing. Such a funny thing,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “We had to reshoot it anyway for a couple of reasons.”

The former Disney star continued, “It’s tonally very specific. Like getting it right, making everybody happy, and also making sure that it translates. It’s so specific. To modernize it and to make it fit like, a bunch of different things that don’t normally go together, it’s just kind of like a puzzle piece. So we’re removing some elements and we’re replacing others. I think the script is going to get another whack, and it’s just going to be a slightly different approach but everything else is going to stay the same.”

A Further Explanation

Dove told E! News in July 2021 that “truly nothing went wrong.”

“We shot an entire pilot. It’s pretty great. We like it,” she added. “We think we can do better and we have the time and we’re going to go back and get it pitch perfect so that, by the time we actually go to series, we’re shooting something and working off of something that we can hopefully work off of for years.”

The Cast’s Reaction

Although the main cast has stayed mum about the Powerpuff news, Dove previously talked about the show’s script during an interview with POPSUGAR.

“The pilot is so phenomenal,” she gushed. “It is wild. The script is wild. The characters are wild. It’s definitely going to be an evolution for The Powerpuff Girls … As a fan, I was reading the script and I was like, ‘Oh, that would be how these girls would grow up. Oh, that would be psychologically what would happen. Oh, that figures in the relationship with the professor.’ It makes sense.”

Dove continued, “There’s a lot of confusion, but we’re not playing 7-year-olds. It’s not a cartoon. They are real people. This is very much real-life problems and girls with trauma [and] what happens if you grow up in the spotlight and you are international superheroes, but you’re real people.”

Next Steps

“Because Powerpuff is such a beloved piece of intellectual property, I feel like there’s this air of conspiracy. Like something big and bad happened,” Dove told Grazia Magazine in September 2021. “We’re just gonna come back and do it again with some tweaks and maybe a different villain and probably some more expensive shoes.”

Game of Thrones Pilot Comparison

The actress who will play Bubbles spoke to ComicBook in February 2022 about the show’s status.

“I have to be careful, because it’s such a big property, and it’s kind of a thin line I have to walk, talking about it in a way that doesn’t give anything away, or say anything too misleading. Where we’re at right now, I can confidently say, is that the producers and [writer Diablo Cody], and everybody involved, their last communication with me is that they’re very, very, very pleased in a way that we were all not,” said Dove.

“The first time we did the pilot, we’ve all talked about it and likened it to Game of Thrones, that did a whole pilot, and then they were like ‘Scrap it. If we’re going to do this, we have to do it right straight out of the gate, or it’s not worth it.’ Powerpuff is such a high concept show, and the way we wanted to do it was so high concept, that there were 99 ways it could have gone wrong, and one way it could have gone right. And I think we were close, but we didn’t nail it. That’s for a number of reasons. I remember them calling me and being like ‘This is how it ended up, and this is what we would rather do,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I can’t even be mad about that. That’s fair. Let’s do that, then.’ I think they really just want to get it right.”

What Dove Revealed

Dove revealed some of the details of the cancelled series during an interview with Elle in November 2023.

“Let me just say, that what we shot, I loved, and that was one of the most fun things,” she began. “I think whatever you thought it was gonna be, it wasn’t gonna be that. And it was very camp-y and very sexy and very fun.”