Joss Whedon

So it’s official: Warner Bros. is rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a film franchise and Joss Whedon will not be involved. While he was entertainingly glib about it, fans worldwide are losing their collective minds. We here at TWoP agree that Buffy is inextricably linked with Joss’ voice and only wish that the studio was revisting one of Whedon’s other past properties instead. Folks at Warner’s: it’s not too late to trade your Buffy reboot for one of the below. We promise we won’t mind! (Much.)

Dollhouse

Whedon’s sci-fi series about programmable assassins/companions was a great idea bogged down by a small budget, some snoozer episodes and a very slow build-up. Given a big-screen budget, a more action-oriented storyline and 100 minutes to get the job done, Dollhouse could be a blockbuster franchise in the making — provided they get a kick-ass action director and replace Eliza Dushku with someone with a little more range. Natalie Portman, perhaps?

Alien Resurrection

The fourth Alien, film, while not without its charms and creepy moments, was the most comedic entry in the series courtesy of screenwriter Whedon, and it diluted the franchise enough that they had to pit the Aliens against Predators to get it going again. An Alien prequel is in the works, but we’d love to give Sigourney Weaver one last chance to bid farewell to the role of Ellen Ripley, preferably with a more serious script that has more action and less baby-alien talk.

Titan A.E.

Whedon may have sprinkled this animated film’s script from the year 2000 with themes he later used on his Firefly series — humans scattered to the four corners of space, smuggler crews, etc. — but underneath theme was a fairly clichéd tale of a boy who’s been left the keys to a lost spaceship that can create a new planet Earth (Wrath of Khan much?). Plus, the blend of early CGI and traditional animation is hard to watch now. We say re-imagine this story of humans as homeless second-class citizens as a darker social drama, a la Battlestar Galactica, and do it entirely in cutting-edge CGI so the aliens don’t look like someone tied a bunch of glow-sticks together and dropped them into some hand-drawn backgrounds.

Speed

Whedon went uncredited for his rewrite of this 1994 action film about a bus that can’t slow down or it’ll explode, but he was reportedly responsible for most of the film’s dialogue. Since the dialogue was by no means the most important part of that movie, we’d be okay with someone tring to bring the franchise back to life after the disaster that was Speed 2: Cruise Control. We say get back to basics, but in a new setting, and have "Always Be Driving" Jason Statham successfully navigate a double-decker bus through London before sending him into vehicular non-stop situations around the world: a bullet train in Tokyo, a stock car in Indianapolis, a bicycle in Paris, etc.

Roseanne

Whedon’s first writing gig was for the long-running TV show starring loudmouth comic Roseanne Barr. Since he was one of a multitude of writers, his absence would not be keenly felt if the show was translated to the big screen with, say, Melissa McCarthy in the title role. Although she plays a friendly character on Mike & Molly, she was occasionally an angry domestic goddess on Gilmore Girls, so we think she has the range to play a sarcastic, white-trash mother of three who doesn’t care what people think of her. Although, really, we’d take any actress who wasn’t Roseanne Barr herself.