Did you know there's a Cruel Intentions reboot afoot?

How brittle do your bones feel now?

I’m not saying that Cruel Intentions is the reason I’m bisexual. That honour goes to Bring It On and the 1999 cinematic masterpiece The Mummy. And I’m not even attracted to anybody in the cast besides Sean Patrick Thomas (I can only assume my dear Joshua Jackson was doing that platinum blonde thing as a joke?). But Cruel Intentions was absolutely formative to my sexual identity, as it came out when I was the exact right age to be appropriately scandalized and titillated by the Merteuil-Valmont shenanigans.

Is it a good movie? It’s hard to say. Character motivations are intentionally murky. Performances are intentionally campy. The fact that these sexual manipulations are happening with teenagers, rather than the adults of the source material, is intentionally problematic. Any of us who tuned in again and again were here specifically to watch the impossibly rich and beautiful teenagers behave impossibly badly. It’s the kind of luxe depravity that you just do not see nowadays.

Or so I thought!

I learned of Amazon’s Cruel Intentions reboot from a Threads post about—who else—Sean Patrick Thomas. The fact that this post just took for granted that we all knew about the reboot is utterly egregious. I hurled myself to YouTube to find the trailer, and this is what I got.

Right off the bat: I find it hard to believe that a boy with that haircut and those cardigans would be a notorious campus slut. But it’s not for me to believe. Sean Patrick Thomas playing a professor with gray in his beard, on the other hand…honestly makes me realize how the generation raised on the OG Degrassi must have felt, seeing the cool kids of their youth relegated to the dorky parental roles in my rebooted version, Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Now, being that I just turned 37, I am nowhere near the key demographic for this reboot. But I am curious how this “new chapter” will land with the teens and young adults it’s meant for. Will they want a show whose entire premise is debauchery? The latest edition of the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers Teens & Screens report found that 62.4% of 14-24-year-olds “feel that sex and sexual content is not needed for the plot of most TV shows and movies.” Now, I do take issue with the question’s wording—first, nothing is “necessary” for a plot; second, plot is not the same thing as story, and being necessary for a plot isn’t the same as being necessary for good storytelling. But it is interesting and important that a growing share of young people are turned off by sexual content in their media. Will they want a show whose entire premise is debauchery? Not just sexual content, but sexual content between step-siblings, one of whom is addicted to cocaine?

I’ve see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, short-circuited by this moment of sibling affection.

Bringing a cultural artifact into the modern era is a high-skill move. 2024 audiences have different values, expectations, and viewing habits than 1999 audiences did. Story elements that resonated, or could be ignored, can’t land the same way. For instance: Selma Blair’s Cecile reads as a naive, awkward innocent in the original movie. Blair’s performance and the film’s framing of her position her as comic relief, and she is very funny. The movie also frames her sexual assault as a punchline, rather than an act of violence; and her boyfriend’s furious reaction as just possessiveness (he tells Sebastian “you fucked Cecile,” not “you raped Cecile”). There’s no way any of that plays as a joke in 2024. This isn’t me lamenting that fact at all, but rather noting the extreme difficulty inherent in transplanting a story whose ugly sensibilities are so baked in to the story itself.

It reminds me of the new twist from Tina Fey, which struggled to keep meanness at the core of a story literally named after it. It struggled to find an audience, too. The Gossip Girl reboot face-planted right out the gate by 1) revealing Gossip Girl’s identity in the first episode, and 2) having the identity be a group of fucking high school teachers. There’s just nothing fun or un-creepy about that premise, I’m sorry. And after that irreversible stumble, the show simply could not get up, girl. The creators were determined to undo everything problematic about the original series, which unfortunately meant wringing any tension out of the stories or characterizations. The frisson of the original Gossip Girl, like Cruel Intentions, was watching rich hotties enjoy behaving badly. If the hotties don’t behave badly, let alone enjoy doing it, you’ve lost that frisson and need to replace it with something new.

Our feelings about watching rich hotties have also changed in the past 25 years. In 1999, wealth and power were still deeply aspirational. To shamelessly quote myself, “Since 1999, we’ve weathered too many financial crises and become too disgusted by wealth disparity for dilettantes and socialites to be heroes or victims in these stories anymore. Still, we haven’t lost our…instinct to press our noses up against the glass and gaze at all that wealth. So now, we make these characters our antagonists and anti-heroes. Now, we root for their downfall while we tell ourselves that we would be better stewards of this kind of privilege…Because, unless we’re willing to forget even more than we usually do to keep living in this specific society, we can’t quite let ourselves go back.” And it turns out, that’s even truer for young people, who don’t seem to want to see stories about the rich and famous at all.

Burrus, A., Hines, A., Rivas-Lara, S., & Uhls, Y.T. (2024). CSS Teens & Screens 2024. Center for Scholars & Storytellers.

So, I’m really not sure if the intended audience will tune in for this one. As for me, I fear I can’t rule it out. I am the person who watched every episode of Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot, after all. (Raise your hand if this is the first you’re hearing of that reboot.) In my defense, I was going through a real Dewey Cox-style dark fucking period—namely, running for office and realizing that I in fact hated politics. Plus, that briskly edited trailer had the good sense to use a synthpop cover of “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a song perfect enough to trick me into wasting some time. Depending on how things go in the world this week, I may be desperate to waste some time not thinking about anything real.