Here’s a movie we didn’t see coming. A new live-action prequel film will see Scooby-Doo characters Daphne and Velma team up for the first time to take on a bunch of zombies. All right then.
The film is being produced by Blondie Girl Productions, which is co-owned by former Disney Channel star Ashley Tisdale and her sister Jennifer, and Warner Bros.’ Blue Ribbon Content. The movie has already begun filming in Atlanta, with Sarah Jeffery portraying Daphne and Sarah Gilman playing Velma. According to Variety, the film, simply called Daphne and Velma, “tells the story of Daphne Blake and Velma Dinkley before they team up with Scooby and the rest of the Mystery Inc. gang. The mystery-solving teens are best friends but have only met online — until Daphne transfers to Velma’s school, Ridge Valley High, stocked with high-tech gadgetry by the school’s benefactor, tech billionaire Tobias Bloom. While their peers vie for a coveted internship at Bloom’s company, Daphne and Velma try to uncover the reason why the school’s brightest students are disappearing — only to emerge again in a zombie-fied state.”
While the original incarnation of the franchise, 1969’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, always featured mundane explanations for its purported supernatural phenomena, recent entries in the series have featured legitimate supernatural threats as opposed to an old man in disguise who would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids. It sounds like this one will be taking the supernatural route, though it’s definitely possible this tech billionaire Bloom could be behind the students’ “zombie-fication.”
The film is slated to be released next year by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, which suggests that this is a direct-to-video production that won’t be seeing release in theaters. That makes sense given the quick turnaround, along with the fact that Warner has already announced the next big budget Scooby-Doo film — originally a live action film called S.C.O.O.B., but now apparently an untitled animated feature — will hit theaters on May 15, 2020 and launch a Hanna-Barbera cinematic universe, because literally everything has to have a cinematic universe these days.
