Hilary Duff Shades Disney Over Delayed ‘Lizzie McGuire’ Revival

Hilary Duff hinted that age appropriateness is what caused Disney Plus to pull the plug on popular 2000’s sitcom Lizzie McGuire’s revival. The project has been halted temporarily as Duff and creator and show-runner Terri Minsky have different creative opinions than Disney on what the revival should be like.

Minsky exited the project in January, after the cast and crew filmed two episodes of the series, which picked up years after the old one, on Lizzie McGuire’s 30th birthday. Disney decided to move in a “different creative direction” upsetting fans who have been waiting for the new show since its 2003 movie.

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Duff seemingly said that reason behind the hiatus is because the revival was not “family-friendly” enough in the eyes of Disney’s new streaming service. On Tuesday, Duff posted a screenshot of a news article about a Love, Simon spinoff series reportedly being moved from Disney to Hulu due to its more mature subject matter.

“Sounds familiar,” Duff wrote on the post.

Minsky also suggested that she left the show because of differences in how adult the show should be.

“I am so proud of the two episodes we did,” Minsky told Variety. “Hilary has a grasp of Lizzie McGuire at 30 that needs to be seen. It’s a wonderful thing to watch. I would love the show to exist, but ideally I would love it if it could be given that treatment of going to Hulu and doing the show that we were doing. That’s the part where I am completely in the dark. It’s important to me that this show was important to people. I felt like I wanted to do a show that was worthy of that kind of devotion.”

Sources told the outlet that Disney Plus wanted the revival to “appeal to kids and families” and be more “akin to the original series,” despite approving of Duff and Minsky’s vision early on in the developmental process.

When the revival was announced at the D23 expo in August, Duff spoke about what her fans could expect to see in the revival.

“Lizzie has also grown up, she’s older, she’s wiser, she has a much bigger shoe budget,” the actor revealed. “She has her dream job, the perfect life right now working as an apprentice to a fancy New York City decorator. She has the perfect man, who owns a fancy restaurant. She’s getting ready to celebrate her 30th birthday.”

The fact that the new series has a gay character is also rumoured to be an issue. Love, Simon also has a gay character, suggesting part of why the two shows aren’t “family-friendly” are their inclusion of LGBTQ characters. In the past, Disney has excluded queer characters from the show, although it has a LGBTQ character in its upcoming Pixar film, Onward.