When Joss Whedon talked about his upset about a Buffy movie happening without him, he missed out one pertinent detail: He’d turned down the chance to write said movie months earlier. According to “studio insiders” that talked to the Hollywood Reporter, Whedon was approached by producers Kaz and Fran Rubel Kuzui last year about working on the big-screen reboot of the popular franchise, but passed in favor of other projects (It’s unknown whether Marvel’s Avengers movie was on the table at that point or not), leading the Kuzuis to look for another writer.
How this fits in with his comment that “I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER” is interesting; did Whedon perhaps think that the project would go away after he turned it down, or was the joke just too good to resist? Nonetheless, this might be the first part of a PR pushback against the internet idea that the character had been “stolen” from Whedon for the new reboot. Maybe Warners hired a Entitled Fanboy Rumor Slayer when no-one was looking.
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