Paramount+ is Remaking Every Movie Ever Made as TV Shows
Paramount+ is quickly establishing itself as the place to go for anyone who thinks there’s too much original content nowadays. Fatal Attraction, the 1987 erotic thriller starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, and Anne Archer, is just one of the many movies the streaming service is turning into a series, and it’s found its lead in Lizzy Caplan. The Fatal Attraction remake joins Flashdance, The Parallax View, The Italian Job, and Love Story, along with a Grease prequel called – I swear; click the link above to confirm I’m not making this up – Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. Caplan will be playing Alex Forrest – or whatever they end up calling the Glenn Close role – in the new Fatal Attraction series, which “will be told through the lens of modern attitudes when it comes to strong women, personality disorders, victim shaming and coercive control.” There’s also some griping about the male gaze. In other words, Alex Forrest is now the hero, because of course, she is. There’s no word on when any of these future classics will premiere.
Dear God, can you imagine announcing all of these things at the same time and patting yourself on the back for it? I’m not going to pretend I have a close attachment to all of these films – you’d have to tie me down and force me to sit through Love Story – but the idea of sifting through a list of properties a company owns and picking a bunch to remake seemingly at random is depressing. In the case of The Italian Job, they’re ruining the ending of the film; the series will revolve around Michael Caine’s grandchildren following in his footsteps and looking for the gold he stole in the movie. That means it will establish that he and his crew didn’t get away with the loot, negating the ambiguity of the final line. Flashdance makes sure we all know they’ll be casting a black woman in the lead, lest we wonder if anything else about the story will be important. (I guess we should give them a point or two for not insulting our intelligence.) The Grease prequel sounds more excruciating than Grease itself, which at least has a few good songs. The Parallax View has the most potential for a series; it’ll have to be different from Alan J. Pakula’s film, which had a theme that wouldn’t sustain a long-form TV show, but the premise could be tweaked enough to make it work. Replacing Warren Beatty with someone whose CW show just got canceled will be a bummer, but I guess we have to pick our battles nowadays.
Do any of these remake/sequel series sound good to you? How many do you think will actually make it to Paramount+? Can we expect a slate of “Actually, Killing Children’s Pets is a Good Thing” articles from the entertainment media before the Fatal Attraction show arrives? Let us know in the comments, and stay tuned to Geeks + Gamers for more TV news!
