NBC cancels Xena reboot, Lucy Lawless co-star responds

NBC has put an end to their planned reboot of the television series Xena, and Lucy Lawless’s Ash vs. Evil Dead co-star Bruce Campbell comments.

If you were looking forward to the official reboot for the 90s fantasy/adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess, we’ve got some bad news for you. According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC has put a fork in the reboot they were planning. NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke has confirmed that the reboot is “dead” in its current form after the attached writer left the project.

“Nothing is happening on that right now. We looked at some material; we decided at that point that it didn’t warrant the reboot,” Salke explains in the article. Basically, that’s just a polite way of her saying that the scripts they saw weren’t up to snuff. Not confident in this idea of a revival, the decision was made to scrap their current plans and head back to the drawing board.

On the other side of the story is Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the writer who left due to “creative differences”. According to Grill-Marxuach in a 2016 interview, his idea for the revival was to further explore the romance between Xena and her companion Gabrielle. “There is no reason to bring back Xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually in first-run syndication in the 1990s,” as he puts it.

The rebooted series would have had a new actress playing the part of Xena, the role which made Lucy Lawless famous in the 90s. These days, Lawless is a series regular on the STARZ horror series Ash vs. Evil Dead, and her co-star from the show, Bruce Campbell, has given his opinion on the nixed reboot:

However, this doesn’t mean that the show will never come back. Salke goes on to explain that NBC is still open to doing a Xena reboot, but with the right concept. So we very well might see a Xena revival one day, but it won’t be anytime soon.