{"id":71753,"date":"2025-07-18T04:46:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T04:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/71753\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T04:46:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T04:46:12","slug":"amazon-giving-joe-eszterhas-4-million-to-write-anti-woke-basic-instinct-reboot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/71753\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon giving Joe Eszterhas $4 million to write “anti-woke” Basic Instinct reboot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey, did Michael Douglas somehow summon this up by announcing he was retiring<\/a>? The Wrap\u00a0is reporting<\/a> that Amazon MGM and United Artists are chucking $2 million\u2014which will be upped to $4 million if the movie actually gets made\u2014at screenwriting sleaze legend Joe Eszterhas, reportedly to write a reboot of his massively successful 1992 money-maker Basic Instinct.<\/p>\n

This is fairly wild, in so far as Eszterhas has been absent from any real Hollywood conversation\u2014absent the occasional\u00a0Showgirls\u00a0nostalgia\/irony confluence\u2014for nearly 30 years, having been dropped out of the business around the time his 1997 comedy\u00a0Burn Hollywood Burn<\/a>\u00a0bombed massively. (He did get some nice press from his 2004 memoir\u00a0Hollywood Animal, but since then it\u2019s mostly been occasional headlines about feuding with Mel Gibson, and a little light coverage of his post-flop pivot to Jesus.) But apparently he\u2019s spent at least some of that intervening time writing a new\u00a0Basic Instinct on spec. (And, in hindsight, why not? That\u2019s how the first movie got made, netting Eszterhas another multi-million dollar paycheck at the time.)<\/p>\n

\u201cBut,\u201d we hear you asking, \u201cHow will this film, a cinematic return to a movie that collided with the sexual politics of the 1990s with absolutely zero subtlety, respond to the updated mores of our modern era?\u201d Well, The Wrap\u00a0reports that Eszterhas\u2019 script is apparently\u2014per an insider source\u2014for an \u201canti-woke\u201d version of a story that was already about how those dang bisexuals are always just waiting to seduce you and then stick an icepick in your head, so let that little shudder of horror you felt during the first half of this sentence serve as a reminder that Eszterhas has still got the juice, fright-wise.<\/p>\n

Basic Instinct\u00a0previously got a sequel, starring Sharon Stone, but sans Eszterhas, in 2006; the film flopped hard, bringing in something like one-tenth of what the 1992 original summoned up at the box office. Amazon MGM has apparently drawn\u00a0a\u00a0lesson from this, although god only knows if it\u2019ll be the right one.<\/p>\n