Disney established an entirely new genre using this tactic, and plenty of other franchises have done it, too. So many 'what ifs' so little necessity for them to be answered in the form of an uninspired reheat.Ĭreatives attempting to modernize a fraught cultural touchstone often like to wield their primary source's outdatedness as a shield against critiques of unoriginality, to the point where it's become a full-on Hollywood cliché. The final scene has police taking Dan's statement and an image of a family portrait of the Gallaghers with their young daughter.īut an eight-episode series 'reimagining' of the movie, created by Alexandra Cunningham and premiering Sunday on Paramount+, wonders: What if things had gone differently? What if we better understood what drove Alex to become unhealthily obsessed with Dan? What if we got Beth's side of the story? What if Dan really had to atone for his affair gone awry? Lizzy Caplan as Alex Forrest and Joshua Jackson as Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction.įatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne's 1987 blockbuster that spawned an untold number of pre-Internet memes and feminist theory academic papers, ostensibly concludes with the hetero nuclear family restored to its 'natural' state: The manic, very unwell homewrecker Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) has been shot dead out of self-defense by Beth (Anne Archer), the wronged wife of Alex's one-time fling Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas).

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