Amazon is giving Joe Eszterhas $4 million to write an "anti-woke" Basic Instinct reboot

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

“But,” we hear you asking, “How 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?” Well, The Wrap reports that Eszterhas’ script is apparently—per an insider source—for an “anti-woke” 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.

Basic Instinct previously 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 a lesson from this, although god only knows if it’ll be the right one.