Regarding a new Buffy movie, Sarah Michelle Gellar recently told E! News that, "if there was ever the right story, we would do it."
While I suspect Ms Gellar has only said this to whip up fan interest in her new comedy series with Robin Williams, The Crazy Ones, Buffy precedes the Twilight saga, The Vampire Diaries and the new potential teens hunting vamps franchise The Mortal Instruments by several years. Add the fact of Buffy's comic continuation into seasons eight and nine, and the chance of successfully writing a two hour film script which respects that long and complex canon, keeps Joss Whedon's fans happy and involves the original cast (despite the fact that vampires don't age but actors do, and the last Angel episode aired in 2004) seems to be just about nil.
Nor should we forget that Ms Gellar also told E! that "the thing with Buffy was that Buffy was a movie, and it ultimately didn't work as a film ... And one of the reasons is that the story works better over time."
Even worse, remember what happened to Whit Anderson, who convinced Warner Bros. she could script a successful Buffy reboot, failed to put enough on the page, and was summarily fired by furious film executives...
So unless the great screenwriter Robert Bolt rises from the grave and does the impossible, it might seem fair to say that the dawn has risen on Buffy and its vampires have turned to dust in the wind. Times change and things fall apart, including Sunnydale.
On the other hand...
Far too often, it feels like Hollywood flings large amounts of money and spectacle at scripts and audiences, trying to outdo each previous instalment with bigger bangs (of one sort or another...) and explosions. A sort of testosterone-fuelled frontal assault by egomaniacs with a poor grasp of detail on shattered cinemagoers who stumble out of the building feeling like they were on the wrong end of George W. Bush's "shock and awe" shelling of Baghdad.
There aren't too many more ways to skin a cat, or rather a vampire, and Buffy's story has already been well-developed through nine succeeding seasons, but what if there was some other way of looking at it?
Consider Wes Craven's 1994 film, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which departed from genre norms (Freddy Krueger hacks up a bunch of teenagers who'd rather have sex with each other than die) and produced an original idea in which the real-life cast played themselves in a fictional scenario where they were menaced in their dreams by the fictional Freddy, who was trying to break into the "real" world.
A complex film, but a welcome change from more and bloodier reprises of the same old slaughter. It didn't do so well at the box office but was a hit with the critics.
So here's my idea for an unconventional Buffy movie which could actually happen:
Dear Miss Landau was originally conceived as a screenplay. I used to be part of an amateur film unit and I've come to realize that, as I have autism, I can think in pictures. The real-life events which led to writing Dear Miss Landau as a book rather than a screenplay only happened three years ago, the copyright largely resides with myself and Chaplin Books, a real-life former Buffy cast member (Juliet Landau) was involved and (with a nod to Freddy Krueger) at the time it did actually feel a bit like Drusilla was trying to break into the real world too, in order to get an autistic screenwriter to tell her story.
It is is a personal story, combined with elements of Buffy, but it's only when you look at the fine detail that further possibilities present themselves. Dear Miss Landau was successor to a tale called Drusilla's Roses, which did indeed tell Dru's story. Roses is strongly referenced in Dear Miss Landau, and other members of Buffy's original cast (Buffy, Dawn, Willow, Giles and Xander) also appeared in Roses.
As I wrote Roses, I could picture every scene. In a film version of Dear Miss Landau, the audience could see glimpses of my "vampire flatmate," Drusilla, and cameos of the cast as they appeared in Roses.
It is as complex a concept as New Nightmare, but Dear Miss Landau has been written and could be filmed. The format is suited to a film's two hour running time, and it would be far easier for original cast members to contribute short cameos and voice-overs than assemble en masse for a full-length shoot.
The fundamentals are there and much has been done.
All it needs is for someone to kick-start it.
Or Kickstart it...