Peacock has pulled the plug on its planned television reboot of Clueless, the 1990s teen comedy film starring Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Peacock is no longer developing its Clueless reboot. That being said, CBS Studios -- the production company behind the canceled project -- is already planning to redevelop a "potentially different" updated take on the original film, which remains a valuable property for the ViacomCBS-owned studio.
CBS Studios' planned Clueless reboot was in the works for roughly a year before a script written by Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey landed at Peacock in August of 2020. Notably, this was before Frances Berwick and Susan Rovner took control of the NBCUniversal-owned streaming platform. According to THR, Berwick and Rovner recently reviewed multiple scripts in development at Peacock before passing on several, Clueless included.
The canceled Clueless reboot was slated to focus on the character of Dionne Davenport (played by Dash in the original film), and was described as a "a baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sun-glasses wearing, oat milk latte and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong number two Dionne steps into Cher's vacant Air Jordans." The project would have seen Dionne tackle the pressure of becoming the new most popular girl in school, while also trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Cher.
Written and directed by Amy Heckerling, Clueless was first released in July 1995 by the Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures. The film starred Silverstone as Cher Horowitz, Dash as Dionne, Brittany Murphy as Tai Frasier and Paul Rudd as Josh Lucas, among others. A television series based on the film aired from 1996 to 1999, with Rachel Blanchard replacing Silverstone as Cher and Dash reprising her role as Dionne. Clueless has seen other continuations in the form of books, comic books, a stage musical and a web story.
A Clueless reboot was reported to be in development at Paramount back in October 2018. One year later, in October 2019, Deadline reported that a TV reboot centered around Dionne was in the work from CBS Television Studios, though information was scarce at the time. Now that Peacock has passed on the project, CBS Studios' next move regarding the property remains to be seen.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter