I’ll show you how valuable aughts IP can be! A TV series inspired by Legally Blonde is “going to Harvard” (or, at least, Prime Video), which, as a millennial writer, presents a challenge: how many film references can I feasibly fit into a 350-word news story? (A lot.) Reese Witherspoon—who, it must be said, reclaimed the word bimbo 20 years before TikTok—is reportedly collaborating with Amazon to develop “a TV offshoot” of the Legally Blonde franchise, with Gossip Girl and The OC’s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage on board to write the scripts.
There’s no word yet on whether Reese herself will actually appear in the series, although she’s previously spoken about her desire to give “Woods comma Elle” the And Just Like That… treatment. “I want to discover what age means to that character,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “Aging, contemporary ideas, how things have evolved—or not evolved.” (Things have not evolved.) I’m also struggling to conceive of anything Legally Blonde-related without at least a cameo from Jennifer Coolidge as Paulette Bonafonté (who ate crullers so Tanya McQuoid could binge “Oreo cookie cake”). Bruiser Woods, for what it’s worth, won’t be returning; Moonie, the Chihuahua who played him, died in 2016 (to be fair, a very good year to check out) at the ripe old age of 18—a news item covered, of all places, by CNN.
This also raises some questions about when, if ever, we’re going to get a Legally Blonde III film—as promised by Witherspoon as far back as 2018 and originally slated for a 2020 release. Mindy Kaling is on board to write the screenplay with Parks and Rec’s Dan Goor, and with virtually all of the 2001 film’s supporting characters (including the Delta Nus) expressing interest in returning. On the one hand, maybe Barbie’s billion-dollar box-office performance might give Reese the push she needs to move forward with production. On the other, how much longer can the fashion industry pretend it likes Barbie pink?