Even Professor Utonium couldn't fix this problem.
E! News confirms that Chloe Bennet will no longer portray Blossom in The CW's live-action series based on the popular show Powerpuff Girls. According to Variety, the actress is unable to participate in the series because of scheduling conflicts.
Though Bennet has exited the series, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault and Donald Faison are still attached to the project, with re-casting for Blossom set to take place in the fall.
In May, The CW CEO Mark Pedowitz said the network had decided to retool the series after watching the pilot episode. "We felt, ‘Let's take a step back and go back to the drawing board,'" he explained. "This is a powerful property, it gauged a lot of interest, and we want to get it right."
Pedowitz added that the initial project "felt a little too campy and not rooted in reality," so the network wanted to give the cast and creative team a chance to reimagine the series before it's considered for a full series pickup.
Cameron, who was cast as Bubbles, later told E! News that the cast was not discouraged by the network's decision, as it's "not abnormal" to reshoot a pilot. "I think because there's so much attention on [Powerpuff Girls], because of...how beloved the franchise is, people are kind of like looking for something crazy to happen when, like, nothing crazy happened," she reasoned. "It's just tonally, it's something that you really have to get right."
She continued, "We shot an entire pilot. It's pretty great. We like it. We think we can do better and we have the time and we're going to go back and get it pitch-perfect so that, by the time we actually go to series, we're shooting something and working off of something that we can hopefully work off of for years."
So far, Faison remains in his role as Professor Drake Plutonium, Nicholas Podany is Jojo Mondel and Robyn Lively plays Sara Bellum.
Heather Regnier and Diablo Cody are writing the pilot, with Maggie Kiley sitting in the director's chair. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and David Madden are all executive producers.