‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Showrunners Didn’t Plan on Killing [SPOILER]: “Scott Pilgrim Fighting the Exes Takes Up So Much Real Estate”

With Scott Pilgrim out of the picture, the new Netflix anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off has ample time to shine a light on its ensemble cast. Though, getting rid of the titular character wasn’t always the plan. Showrunners Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski found that the idea to shift focus to the other characters came organically as they were fleshing out their overall objective.

“When I started thinking about Scott Pilgrim and the possibility of revisiting the story, all I had heard the last few years is, like, ‘Scott’s the worst character in his own story’ and ‘We hate Scott,'” O’Malley, who penned the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, told Decider over a Zoom call.

“People didn’t start yelling about it until the last few years on social media. So yeah, when we talked about doing it in 2023, or whatever, I had to take that into account,” he continued. “I find it entertaining to go head-on into that… you know, here’s what you want. Let’s take Scott away and see what happens!”

The series follows Scott (Michael Cera) as he meets the “girl of his dreams” Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and decides to pursue her. However, he quickly discovers that he must defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes, to her dismay, before they can be together.

In the graphic novel series and the faithful 2010 movie adaptation, Scott successfully beats all of the exes, one by one, despite facing several hiccups along the way. But the anime series takes a different route, and instead finds Scott defeated in his first battle with an evil ex. After the fight, he disappears and leaves a few coins in his place.

During our chat, Grabinski insisted that getting rid of Scott was an “extra bonus” to their initial intention for the series, which was to dedicate more time to Ramona. He said, “The issue is that Scott fighting the exes takes up so much real estate that it’s really hard to spend more time with [Ramona] or the exes, and these other characters.”

He continued, “So, the initial reason for coming to the premise was purely as a way to organically tell our Ramona-centric story. It wasn’t like the premise was ‘Let’s get rid of Scott!’ We weren’t sitting around, reading articles about Scott Pilgrim and complaining, that had nothing to do with our thought process.”

Grabinski, whose previous work includes Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Happily, was a Scott Pilgrim fan long before co-developing the anime series. While he has appreciated the story of Scott and his journey to “becoming a better person” in previous adaptations, he wanted to focus specifically on Ramona in his series. “What if Ramona learned more about herself and grew in a way that we haven’t seen yet? What if she had to interact with the exes in a different way — when someone’s not just fighting and killing them? What happens? What does she learn about herself? How does she grow? What does she learn about them?”

As the series continues, Ramona realizes that Scott isn’t actually dead and she confronts each of her exes in order to try to figure out where he has disappeared to.

“The idea of spending more time with the exes, learning more about them, and having characters that have never spent time with each other spending time with each other was so appealing to us,” Grabinski added. “We hope it will be for fans too. There are all [of] these people who never expected to love each other, or fight each other, or argue with each other, or even share a scene. We had an organic way to do all that without it feeling forced. It was a natural progression of where the story would go.”

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is currently streaming on Netflix.