Reese Witherspoon has announced that the Legally Blonde prequel series, Elle, has officially started filming. Revealed in 2023, the show will dive into the life of Elle Woods during her high school years, long before she became the Harvard Law student audiences met in Legally Blonde. Witherspoon, who made Elle Woods iconic in the 2001 film, is producing the series, with Lexi Minetree taking on the role of the younger Elle. The series is being produced by Amazon MGM Studios.
To mark the start of production, Witherspoon shared an exclusive first look on Instagram. The image features Minetree as Elle, wearing the character’s signature pink attire, sitting on a pink bed, and holding a corded telephone. Witherspoon’s caption reads, “Harvard was hard. High School was harder. Our new series, Elle, is now in production!”
Produced by Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine company, the series will have Laura Kittrell and Caroline Dries as showrunners. Kittrell, known for her work on Insecure, and Dries, who has worked on Smallville, Batwoman, and The Vampire Diaries, will oversee the series. The show will also feature June Diane Raphael and Tom Everett Scott as Elle’s parents, Eva and Wyatt Woods.
Elle appears to be stepping into the void left by Legally Blonde 3. The third movie in the franchise had been discussed for over a decade, following the mixed reception to 2003’s Legally Blonde: Red, White & Blonde. In 2018, Witherspoon was reported to reprise her role in Legally Blonde 3, aiming for a 2020 release, but the project never materialized. A script for the third film was being developed by Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor in 2020, but since then, no updates have been given.
Despite Elle initially seeming like an unconventional choice for a prequel, Witherspoon has stated the show draws inspiration from Netflix’s Wednesday, and it’s easy to see parallels to other prequel series, like Young Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. After Amazon’s acquisition of MGM Studios in 2022, there was a clear interest in expanding the studio’s catalog with new franchise content, and Elle seems to be a key part of that strategy.