"Heathers" gets made over

...again

The 1988 film Heathers, starring Winona Ryder, is undergoing a reboot and will be released as a TV show in 2018. An official trailer was published on instagram six days ago, and has been garnering comments that point out the very drastic differences between the movie and the new rendition.

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Originally, Heathers was a dark comedy that took a stereotypical, ‘perfect’ social hierarchy of girls and pushed them to unveil a hilarious and disturbing struggle for popularity. The TV reboot appears to have much of the same structure; based on the trailer, Veronica is still the main character, and the Heathers will still most likely be at the top of the so-called food chain. Since the trailer is so short, facts concerning the plot of the show are rather difficult to glean. There could be no connection to the plot outside of the character’s names and roles in the movie.

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Confirmed differences between the TV show and the movie rear their heads in the teaser trailer. Perfectly styled hair and petite, professional clothing has been swapped out with gold chains, punk t-shirts, and explosively vibrant color. Additionally, one of the Heathers will be played by Brendan Scannell, a male actor famous for his role in Where You Are (2016); in the first Heathers, all of the Heathers were strictly female.

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The TV show boasts a few quotes that were taken directly from the original film, but the trailer doesn’t seem to indicate that the directors paired the correct quotes with the correct characters. Whether the misplaced nods to the movie are intentional will be left to speculation until the TV show airs in 2018.

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Many critics and fans of the original movie are a bit thrown by the large changes proposed by the trailer, and are stating that the show might be too different for their tastes. However, this is not the first time that Heathers received a makeover. The musical Heathers, another remake of the movie, also received a bit of criticism for its differences; still, the play stuck to the general story and was executed well. Thus, even if the TV show does stray from the original movie’s cosmetics, there is still a rather large chance that it will abide by the plot and give fans a more modernized version of the cultist comedy.