Jonathan Hurwitz, a writer on the canceled Lizzie McGuire reboot, is opening up about the storylines the series would’ve covered.
In a TikTok video, Hurwitz says that the first two episodes of the Disney+ series were shot and written. The first episode finds Hilary Duff‘s Lizzie living in New York City as an interior designer. Lizzie soon finds out her chef boyfriend is cheating on her with her best friend, which prompts her to move back to her childhood home in California, where animated Lizzie is waiting for her.
Fans of the Disney Channel series questioned if Lizzie and her best friend Gordo would be the end game, but the writer revealed that in Episode 2, Lizzie finds out her childhood friend is about to be a father and happily engaged.
At the end of the second episode, Lizzie gets a message from her childhood crush, Ethan Craft.
Hurwitz says that Episode 3 didn’t end up getting filmed and this is the episode that he thinks Disney had some issues with.
“Episode 3 wasn’t filmed, but there was a script for it,” Hurwitz said. “Lizzie wakes up in Ethan’s bed, in his water polo t-shirt. Animated Lizzie pops up and she has this little checklist, like a to-do list, and Ethan is on the list and she checks it off.”
Hurwitz continued, “I think she says something like, ‘I checked that box –dramatic pause– twice.’ So if I had to guess, I saw another comment about certain storylines [about] why Disney wasn’t comfortable with it, my guess was… that moment was probably one of them.”
Watch Hurwitz explain what the Lizzie McGuire reboot would’ve been like.
When Disney was prepping to launch Disney+, they looked to IP to bring people in, and one of them was a reboot of Lizzie McGuire starring Duff, which was a beloved franchise on the Disney Channel. Creative differences between Duff and Disney+ executives were what halted the revival. Duff wanted to make a more adult version of Lizzie McGuire to reflect her age, while the streamer wanted to keep it as family-friendly as possible.
Although the series was ultimately scrapped, Duff said last year she was still optimistic about making the reboot, saying in an interview on Watch What Happens Live she would like the revival to happen because “it lived up to her vision.”
“Disney+ was very new and I think they were figuring out their… and we were figuring out our… and I am optimistic,” she added.
