Growing up in the ’90s, serialized heroines were big on the small screen with Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—heck, even Sabrina the Teenage Witch. After Netflix’s dark Sabrina reboot and the new Buffy in the works with Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to mentor a new chosen one, all we need now is to see Xena ride again.
And that might be on the verge of happening. The cast and creative team behind Xena recently participated in an oral history of the show for Entertainment Weekly and had a lot to say when it came to a Xena revival. Star Lucy Lawless shared, “Gotta tell you, I don’t know why they haven’t been able to do it. What I keep hearing is you have to do it as well or better than the original, and they keep feeling like it’s not as good or better or totally different. It might need to be just totally different.”
Co-star/director Bruce Campbell added, “The themes are very relevant to today. Loyalty, friendship, complicated relationships. Xena said it’s okay to have complicated relationships in an otherwise action-centered show.”
Xena co-creator Rob Tapert elaborated on the true status of the reboot: “We are trying to launch a new version of Xena. It would not be the story of Xena and Gabrielle with Lucy and Renee. It would be like they did with Star Trek, a reimagining of that universe. Whatever it’s gonna be, it will be different, which is exciting. Thirty years later, it has to be different.”
Ted Raimi, who was a staple on the show as Joxer, agreed. “You’d have to completely rethink it,” he explained. And the creative team, which collaborated on the original Evil Dead films, hopes to do something different. “To do it well, in my opinion, you’d have to do it brilliantly like what the Karate Kid did with Cobra Kai. Which is, they’re just older and it’s a whole new bunch of problems they have. Because there’s no way that anyone would wanna see me at my age jumping around and doing those goofy faces. If you redid it in that way, I think that it could be done.”
Tapert added insight toward the current direction they plan to go in, which is more cinematic. “But for a feature, now 30 years on, I’m interested in doing that,” he revealed. “I don’t know when and where it is, but they’re gonna see a script somewhere in the next three to six months, and one can only hope.”
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