Hilary Duff Is Still Open To A Lizzie McGuire Reboot In The Future
TBH, I'd be so down to catch up with Lizzie in her 40s.
Lizzie McGuire knows how to roll with the punches. No matter what insult Kate flung at her, what weird prank Matt pulled on her, or what Italian pop star conned her into lip-syncing at the Colosseum, Lizzie always managed to figure it out on the way. So of course, everyone’s favorite Disney girl isn’t about to let the crash-and-burn of her reboot get her down. Although Disney+ shelved the new series at the end of 2020, Hilary Duff recently revealed she still has hope a future Lizzie McGuire reboot will eventually air.
Duff has expressed her disappointment in Disney not moving forward with the Lizzie McGuire reboot several times since it was canceled, but she still thinks a reboot will see the light of day eventually. During the March 2 episode of The Cut’s “In Her Shows” podcast, the actor said there’s “always a possibility” for the revival to be re-revived, and went on to plant the idea of a series following Lizzie in her middle age years.
“I think there's always a possibility there,” Duff said. “And even if she's 40, I don't think people care. It's always going to be somewhat interesting to people to see where she ended up.”
The statement comes nearly a year and a half after Duff confirmed the already-in-production revival had been canceled by Disney+ at the end of 2020. The streamer initially announced its series order for the reboot back in 2019, but production quickly hit some major obstacles when filming began in 2020. The issue was the reboot’s more mature subject matter, with the pilot centering on the now-30-year-old Lizzie discovering her boyfriend had been cheating on her. That didn’t jibe with Disney+’s “family friendly” brand, as Duff herself revealed when she publicly pleaded that the reboot be moved to the more adult-skewing streamer Hulu: “I’d be doing a disservice to everyone by limiting the realities of a 30-year-old’s journey to live under the ceiling of a PG rating,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
Ultimately, the move to Hulu never happened and now the two episodes of the Lizzie McGuire reboot that were filmed are buried in Disney+’s content graveyard. Hopefully Duff will be able to bring Lizzie back someday, but for now, she’s back on the small screen in the How I Met Your Mother reboot, How I Met Your Father, which coincidentally enough, streams on Hulu.
