Expressing what we can’t help but think of as the “making a movie for several tens of millions of dollars” equivalent of an apparently incurable verbal tic, Hollywood has decided it’s just got to reboot the Charlie’s Angels franchise as a movie. Again.
This is per THR, which reports that Sony has apparently put a new film version of the classic ’70s cheesefest into early development, following some deep, unknowable, and possibly tidal Tinseltown whim. Although Sony itself is in “no comment” mode on the project, THR reports that Peter Chiarelli—a writer whose biggest job prior to this was on Crazy Rich Asians, and who has a “story by” credit on Sony’s current animated feature Goat—is being tapped to write this latest version of the story.
We’ll be honest here, folks: This one has us flummoxed. It’s not like Charlie’s Angels hasn’t been a workable brand at some point in living memory: The original show was wildly popular back in its day, and the 2000 film, directed by McG, managed to be a pretty fun time by dint of not getting in the way of Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu’s goofball energy. But subsequent efforts to keep the series going really don’t seem to have paid off on producers’ beliefs that the Angels brand has some sort of inherent staying power. The 2003 sequel Full Throttle performed decently at the box office, but a 2011 attempt to bring the Angels back on TV crashed out after less than a single season. And while we wouldn’t argue that Elizabeth Banks’ 2019 film reboot is entirely dire—if nothing else, Patrick Stewart and Kristen Stewart are both having a lot of fun playing various genre tropes—it was also a notorious box office bomb.
Are we simply underestimating film execs’ belief that you can make a bankable movie out of any name that most of the people on the planet have heard of? Or is Chiarelli sitting on some dynamite idea to make “young, attractive women solve crimes or do spy stuff or whatever” really pop? Is it a rights thing? What sound echoes in the modern film executive’s mind, that tells them that they will be the ones to make Charlie’s Angels work for more than a single film at a time? Is it the flapping of angel’s wings? Or those of some kind of cinematic, feminism-lite Icarus? Regardless, here we are: They’ll probably outlive us all.
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