The Wild Trailer for the CW’s Powerpuff Girls Reboot Has Leaked Online

Do you recall when the CW announced its plans for a live-action Powerpuff Girls series in 2021? If your answer is no, it is understandable given that the soft reboot series’ pilot was reworked, one of the leading actresses left the project, and the show was ultimately canceled in 2023. Despite the tumult surrounding the show’s cancellation, a trailer leaked online, offering the world a glimpse of what might have been.

Today, Lost Media Busters, a YouTube channel whose whole deal is uncovering lost and unreleased media, uploaded a video of the CW’s Powerpuff Girls. (Just as this post was being published, the clip was removed, with a note that Warner Bros. had blocked it “on copyright grounds.) The series would’ve starred Agents of SHIELD‘s Chloe Bennet as Blossom, Descendants‘ Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and singer Yana Perrault as Buttercup. Joining them would’ve been Scrubs‘ Donald Faison as Professor Utonium, Robyn Lively as Sara Bellum, and Nicholas Podany as Joseph “Jojo” Mondel Jr. (aka Mojo Jojo’s son).

The three-and-a-half-minute trailer, narrated by Tom Kenny, follows the titular girls as the 20-somethings basically grow up as Disney Adults; Bubbles has a drinking problem while the rest rebel in their own ways against their cookie-cutter heroic images in Townsville. Somewhere down the line the girls mess up and Mojo Jojo finally kicks the bucket. In the fallout of whatever the girls did to cost Mojo Jojo his life, Blossom runs away from home, Jojo’s son becomes the major, Buttercup becomes a firefighter, and Bubbles kind of coasts by as a failed influencer.

When the girls reunite seven years after killing Mojo Jojo (it’s really unclear whether they’re actually responsible or not), they’re forced to join forces once more when Jojo’s son seeks patricidal revenge by machinating a plan to end the professor’s life. The plan involves manipulating the minds of Townsville’s denizens, causing the professor to lead them into uncontrollable riots. The end of the trailer teases that the girls would have spent the rest of the series trying to clear their father’s name, uncover who set him up, and save the day.

Whether the video has been copyright claimed and scrubbed from the internet by the time you’re reading this, it should be mentioned that the Powerpuff Girls live action show certainly looks like… well, a CW show, with a plenty of awkward actor blocking and shoddy CGI that YouTubers like Rocket Jump could’ve done a better job actualizing. But that isn’t to say that the show didn’t have any defining characteristics that would’ve made it worth a pity watch.

Key among them is its assortment of millennial-branded humor occasionally hitting the mark, such as Bubbles being “down to clown” with the Juggalos of the Insane Clown Posse, Jojo Jr. having an intense dislike for Blossom, and Buttercup no longer supporting Townsville. Having typed all that out and rewatched the trailer, the above is certainly grounds for cancellation. Still, it probably would’ve gotten eaten up by viewers on the entertainment value of hate-watching it.

Prior to Bennet’s departure from the show, CW Chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz told Variety the network still had faith in the project and was considering reshoots because its initial pilot “felt a little too campy.”

“It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board,” Pedowitz said.

Unlike most shows and films that are completed but never see the light of day, we were fortunate to glimpse what the CW’s Powerpuff Girls show might have looked like. However, it is certainly intriguing to consider what the show could have been like if they had not intended it to be as campy as the leaked trailer suggested.

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