Netflix has acquired the latest Scooby-Doo project for its catalogue, and unlike Velma… It’s live-action.
Merely five days after the complete failure of Velma Season 2, which currently sits at a 10% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it has been revealed that a new series in the universe of Scooby-Doo is in development and that it will be live-action. It’s a new move for the franchise, considering it has never had an official project of this type as there have only been live-action films.
The History Of The Live-Action Mystery Incorporated
The first live-action film, Scooby-Doo, was released in 2002 and was met with box office success and generally negative reviews but later gained status as a cult classic, spawning a sequel.
The series was later rebooted twice, the first time with 2009’s Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and its subsequent sequel Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, and the second time with 2018’s Daphne & Velma.
State Of The Franchise
Consequently, the Scooby-Doo IP has garnered a tumultuous history of live-action adaptations and the franchise has slowed down in recent years, only having two series (one critically panned) and ten films in the last six years. Additionally, the scrapping of the fully finished Scoob! sequel, Scoob! Holiday Haunt, did not help the state of the franchise and only angered fans.
An Attempt At Definition
And now, Netflix has won a bidding war for the next Scooby-Doo series, which is being developed by Warner Bros. Television and Berlanti Productions. There aren’t many public details regarding the upcoming series, which was only revealed with this news but it is reportedly being referred to as Scooby-Doo! The Live-Action Series.
Although this is probably just a working title, from an audience perspective it puts a lot of emphasis on the fact that it isn’t only a Scooby-Doo project, but it is THE live-action series and hopefully, the definitive one as fan projects have been made. In 2022, a crowd-funded series titled Mystery Incorporated released a pilot episode to YouTube, which you can watch here, but is yet to release the second episode.
As for Greg Berlanti and the Berlanti Productions team, they recently released Dead Boy Detectives, another WBTV Netflix release and evidently Netflix is eager to work with the producer again. Next up for Berlanti are the streaming films Atlas (also at Netflix) and Fly Me To The Moon (at Apple TV+).
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