Scooby Apocalypse Is the Scooby-Doo Reboot We Deserve

DC’s comic would make the perfect movie or TV show.

A new live-action Scooby-Doo project might be on the horizon, with reports revealing on Monday that Warner Bros. Television and Netflix are rebooting the franchise for television. The series, which counts Arrowverse and Riverdale alum Greg Berlanti among its executive producers, will reportedly be an hour-long drama, although it is unclear at this point exactly what premise that will follow.

The very news of development on a new Scooby-Doo series has already sent the Internet into a tizzy, as fans of the long-running multimedia franchise debate about which direction the show should take. While there’s no telling at this point if the Scooby-Doo series will be a straightforward adaptation of the source material, or something a bit more esoteric, the conversation has brought up another project that seems tailor-made for movies or television — Scooby Apocalypse. 

Created by Jim Lee and written by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis with art by Howard Porter, Dale Eaglesham, Ron Wagner, and Jan Duursema, Scooby Apocalypse first made its DC debut in May of 2016. As the title suggests, the series places Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Machine Gang in a post-apocalyptic world, in which nearly everyone has been mutated by a terrifying nanovirus.

The wasteland scenario of Scooby Apocalypse not only allows readers to check in on the characters in an older point in their lives, with all of the messiness that that entails, but makes way for some grotesque sequences. The series ultimately ran for three years, debuting its final issue in April of 2019.

Why We Need a Scooby Apocalypse Adaptation.

Whether as a standalone movie or as some sort of television reboot, the mere pitch of Scooby Apocalypse could easily translate beyond the comic book page. There have certainly been plenty of recent television hits that tap into a high-concept apocalyptic setting, ranging from Prime Video’s recent Fallout to HBO’s 2023 hit The Last of Us to AMC’s ever-evolving The Walking Dead franchise. That cultural familiarity would certainly help sell something as gruesome as Scooby Apocalypse, especially when the larger Scooby franchise is more traditionally associated with rubber monster masks. It would be a shocking reimagining of the expectations older fans have of Scooby-Doo, without completely diverting from any sort of existing canon. 

A Scooby Apocalypse adaptation would also provide space for the central cast of characters to really shine, an element that has been a bit make-or-break as the franchise has evolved. While Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy do lean into a series of archetypes, they have endured in weirder and more personal moments, whether in a fleeting line of dialogue or a larger character beat. That’s part of why adaptations like James Gunn’s live-action Scooby Doo movies have remained fan favorites — and why the original Scooby Apocalypse comic quickly became a hit amongst readers. It’s easy to imagine an adaptation of Scooby Apocalypse, in the hands of the right creative team, having the same effect.