When Franchises are Ruined: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

CAUTION: Fan Rant

So the news that Buffy Summers is set to return to the big screen in the coming year or two is roughly a month or so old now, but I was just having a little personal geek time, re-watching old Buffy and Angel episodes, and I just can’t take it anymore.

For those not completely up on the story, it goes as such: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is set to be remade, and is being produced by Fran Rubel Kuzui — the director of the original movie — and her husband, Kaz Kuzui.  The movie will have zero input from Joss Whedon, the man who wrote the original screenplay and subsequently created, produced and carried the TV series to become the beloved show we all know today.

“So what if he was the original writer,” you may say, “it’s not like the movie was that good anyway.”  And you’re half right.  The original movie has something a cult following to this day not because it’s necessarily good, but mostly because of how bad and campy it turned out to be.  In fact, it was more or less for these very reasons that Whedon left the set up Buffy way back when because he couldn’t stand what the director and producers were doing to his story.

But for all the hate I could keep throwing at the movie, it’s all long done with and mostly just water under the bridge at this point.  Hell, if it wasn’t for the movie being so bad we may never have gotten the TV show at all, right?

What really gets under my skin are the Kuzui’s themselves.  A quick IMDb query showed that since the original Buffy film, Mrs. Kuzui hasn’t made a single new feature.  Thanks to her ownership to the copyrights of the franchise, however, she and her husband continued to receive producer’s credit the Buffy TV show, as well as its spin-off, Angel.  It makes you wonder just how much money the lovers Kuzui have made off of Whedon’s plethora of creativity while they got to sit back and twiddle their thumbs.

Whedon himself, when asked of his thoughts on the subject, has mostly just shrugged it off (he’s got Dollhouse season two on his mind after all)… and what can anyone really say?  Anyone who hears the news thinks it’s a horrible idea — the only people who don’t seem to get it are the Kuzui’s themselves.  My initial thoughts when hearing of the new movie, before hearing ALL of the details, was one of excitement and joy — I assumed the movie would most likely be an adaptation of Buffy Season 8, the comic book series that Whedon himself has been at the helm of for the last year or two.  And I can go ahead and say with a fair degree of confidence that if the new film is made and bombs, as it most likely will (and, honestly, even if it doesn’t), it will definitely mark the end of any possible future Whedon-attached Buffy films that actually deserve to be made. (You also have to wonder if there is some kind of award for ruining a franchise TWICE?)

And I guess what I’ve really been getting at this whole time is that Fran Kuzui had her chance already to make a good sci-fi/fantasy film, but sold her soul to make her film try to appeal to a more massive audience (which she failed at as well).  I for one wouldn’t mind if she kept collecting her Buffy royalties so long as Whedon got to make the film that fans truly deserve…

*Sigh*

End rant.