Sorry ‘Lizzie McGuire’ fans, the Disney+ reboot for the series has been officially cancelled. Hilary Duff made the announcement on her instagram account a few hours ago and hundreds of thousands of fans responded to the post. Check out the letter at the bottom of the article.
Hilary Duff came to prominence in the 2001 hit American comedy television series ‘Lizzie McGuire’. The Terri Minsky created series ran for two seasons which featured the title character navigating through social and personal issues of her junior high school life. The series also featured an animated version of the titular character (voiced by Duff) who performed monologues expressing Lizzie McGuire’s inner thoughts and emotions. The last episode aired in Feb 2004.
The series capped off with a movie titled ‘The Lizzie McGuire Movie’ where the showrunner Terri Minsky joined the cast as well. The movie was directed by Jim Fall and was well received by its target audience. In 2019, Duff and Disney went into talks to create a possible sequel series for ‘Lizzie McGuire’ with Terri Misky to return as the showrunner, which will run on Disney+. The series would feature Lizzie McGuire dealing with the ups and downs of adulthood with the help of her old friends and family and her 13-year-old animated alter ego.
Terri Minsky was the behind the scenes showrunner for the original show and bringing her back was a huge boost to the project. Nearly the entire cast – Adam Lamberg, Jake Thomas, Hallie Todd and Robert Carradine all returned to the Disney+ reboot to reprise their roles but after the filming of two episodes, Disney felt they needed to take a different direction. And because of creative differences, Minsky left the project.
The project pretty much fell apart from there. In the letter which she posted she says “Lizzie McGuire’s fans have high expectations for any new stories. Unless and until we are confident we can meet those expectations, we’ve decided to hold off and today, we informed the cast’s representatives that we are not moving forward with the planned series.” We think Minsky leaving might have been the catalyst that caused this reboot to fail. Hopefully we will get a better planned reboot in the future and it will work out next time.