Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Lands Ramona Flowers a New Delivery Gig

In a new interview, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off executive producers Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski revealed that they had to make some adjustments to set this version of the graphic novel in a kind of suspended “Scott Pilgrim Time.” Edgar Wright, the director of the film, once described its setting as “the Amélie version of Toronto.” And in keeping with that retro-nostalgic feel, O’Malley and Grabinski knew they had to update Ramona Flowers’ employer.

“Bryan and I and were writing one day thinking, they’re never going to let us have her deliver packages for Amazon,” Grabinski explained, speaking to Entertainment Weekly. In the film, Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is seen wearing a blue Amazon vest—something that wasn’t going to work in a Netflix production. But, this is Scott Pilgrim Time. If they were going to evoke retro-nostalgia, there was another option.

What if Ramona Flowers delivered Netflix DVDs? A cute wink to Flowers’ original job, a little meta joke about the fact that this is a Netflix production, and a clear callback to that kind of nebulous time when millennials were teenagers and Netflix DVDs would magically show up in the mailbox every couple of weeks.

Grabinski continued, “When we first sent it in [to Netflix] someone said, ‘Well, we don’t know if we can clear that through legal.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? You cannot do this joke that she delivers DVDs for Netflix? Come on, you’re Netflix! Figure it out!’”

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will be available to stream on November 17 on Netflix.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.

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