Elle Woods is coming back…this time, to the small screen.
Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, is developing a “Legally Blonde” spinoff series with Amazon MGM Studios, Deadline reported Thursday. “Gossip Girl” executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are also contributing to the project.
“Legally Blonde” debuted in 2001, quickly becoming a beloved pop culture phenomenon and propelling Witherspoon to superstardom. Her character Elle Woods — the titular blonde — is a Harvard law student who triumphs over stereotypes to achieve her dreams, endearing and inspiring others in the process.
The sequel, “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde” came out in 2003, and a third installment, “Legally Blonde 3” is currently being cowritten by by Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor. It’s been in the works for a few years now, for good reason. In addition to delays due to the 2023 Writers Guild strike, Kaling has said she and her team are taking their time writing it because they want to do the project justice.
“I love this project. I am so excited about it. We are working on it,” Kaling told ET in 2022. “It is going, you know, a little more slowly than we like but [it’s] just because we really want it to be good. I think of it as like, Reese’s Avengers. Elle Woods is like her Captain America, so you don’t want to be the person that messes up that story. So for me, we are just taking our time because we want it to be really good.”
In addition to sequels 2 and 3, the franchise includes the 2009 direct-to-DVD movie “Legally Blondes” — a spinoff about younger twin cousins of Elle Woods who move from England to California — and the award-winning “Legally Blonde” Broadway musical adaptation released in 2007.
Clearly, there’s an appetite for more “Legally Blonde.” Deadline reports that there are potentially two spinoff series in the works: the aforementioned project helmed by Witherspoon and the “Gossip Girl” team as well as a second spinoff that is still in the “preliminary, idea stages.”
While no plot information is available yet for any of the projects, Witherspoon has previously expressed interest in revisiting a version of Elle Woods in her 40s. “I want to discover what age means to that character,” Witherspoon told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “Aging, contemporary ideas, how things have evolved — or not evolved.”
This story was originally published by Taylor Kuether at Simplemost.
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