One Underrated ‘90s Sci-Fi Movie Is Suddenly Getting A Weird Reboot
It's not dead. Not yet.
The most star-studded B-movie of the ‘90s is making a comeback. Again. After spawning a 2017 sequel/reboot that nobody remembers, the original Flatliners is once again trying to come back from the dead. Although the first film came and went in 1990, this Joel Schumacher-directed oddity — which starred Julia Roberts, Kimberly Scott, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, and Kiefer Sutherland — has simmered for the past three decades as the truest of cult classics. With mixed-to-bad reviews at the time, Flatliners is one of those horror/sci-fi movies that a few generations saw on VHS, and never got out of our heads.
And now, apparently, Flatliners is trying to get back into our heads with a roundabout reboot. According to Deadline, a sequel to the original film will now become a new book, and that book could maybe become a movie. Again.
The original movie centered on five med students experimenting with putting themselves in a near-death state in order to figure out what death was really like. The result is a series of unsettling hallucinations, in which everyone’s skeletons in their respective closets come back to haunt them in the present. But, although this sounds like a full-on ghost or time-travel movie, the original film —directed by Joel Schumacher with a script from Peter Filardi — errs on the side of psychological horror, rather than full-on a full-on paranormal story.
But now, oddly, as a forthcoming brand-new book written by J.D. Barker, the path for Flatliners will reportedly “lean into the supernatural element more than Filardi did with the original [screenplay].” Interestingly, this new book is actually based on an early draft of Filardi’s screenplay, rather than the finished movie. After regaining the rights to this early draft of the script, Filardi was persuaded by Barker to present the story, again, as it was originally written.
So, in theory, this new Flatliners will be one of the strangest reboots of all time — both based on the original movie, but also, based on a version of the original movie that nobody saw. And because the new Barker-penned Flatliners book is already being shopped around for potential adaptation into another movie, this process of reanimation is beginning anew.
What if we get turned into a book? (Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon in Flatliners).
For genre fans, there’s certainly always a hunger to see a cool concept like Flatliners in a way that was perhaps originally intended by its creator. And yet the process to get to this new version of the story is fascinatingly circuitous. Because this is an earlier draft written by the same person who wrote the final draft that became the movie, the differences between this new/old Flatliners and the 1990 film must be significant. Otherwise, what would be the story?
Approaching the edge of death, complete with nice brand recognition of a 1990s cult film, might help the book Flatliners gain some curious readers, or, as Barker and Filardi have suggested, create a generation of entirely new fans. But will this new, more supernatural-ly version improve upon the gritty B-movie quality of the original? Perhaps it doesn’t need to. As countless horror stories have taught us — from Bram Stoker to Stephen King — when you come back from the dead, you’re never the same as you were before. This is especially true of horror movie ideas that refuse to die.
