5 ’80s Movies That Deserve the Ultimate Prestige TV Reboot

Classic ’80s movies like Alternated States and the underrated thriller No Way Out deserve to have their stories revisited, but as prestige TV dramas, rather than film reboots. In one way or another, each of the movies listed below would be better off as long-form television if they’re ever remade.

Remaking iconic movies is risky business. Yet at the same time, there are decades of stories that deserve to be updated for modern audiences, which is where mixing up the medium comes in.

A whole season of TV, or more, offers opportunities for each of these stories to exand and deeper than a film’s limited runtime doesn’t.

Altered States

Directed By Ken Russell; Written By Paddy Chayefsky; Starring William Hurt, Blair Brown & More; Released In 1980

Altered States is a pioneering body horror film, one that set the stage for later ’80s horror thrillers like From Beyond, The Stuff, and more. In the movie, William Hurt’s character Eddie Jessup gets more than he bargained for after experimenting with the limits of consciousness using sensory deprivation and hallucinogens.

Jessup gets to the brink of transcending the physical plane of existence before being saved by his wife Emily in the film’s climax. Altered States‘ disturbing imagery and challenging ideas about human evolution, and de-evolution, made it a boundary-pushing film in 1980. A modern remake would be best suited for TV, where the story’s twists, turns, and transformations would have more room to breathe.

Blow Out

Written And Directed By Brian De Palma; Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow & More; Released In 1981

Auteur filmmaker Brian de Palma made Blow Out at the start of the 1980s, just two years before his gamechanging gangster film Scarface. The conspiracy film is gritty and pulpy, but that doesn’t take away from the complexity of the thriller’s plot, which is ripe for expansion into a prestige TV drama.

Blow Out is an intense movie, and that tension could be artfully stretched out over the course of multiple episodes, in ways the 108-minute film didn’t have time for. From John Travolta’s protagonist, to Nancy Allen’s complicated female lead, to John Lithgow’s memorable villain Burke, each character could be fleshed out in more detail in a TV adaptation.

Blow Out is Brian de Palma’s unreprentant Hitchcock homage, updated for the ’80s, with a premise akin to Rear Window. Hickcock’s legendary Jimmy Stewart film got a modern reboot with 2007’s Disturbia; decades later, it is time to revisit Blow Out, and it should be a show, not a movie.

Brainstorm

Directed By Douglas Trumbull; Written By Phillip Frank Messina & Robert Stitzel; Starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood & More; Released 1983

Brainstorm is another ahead-of-its-time early ’80s sci-fi film. At least, the movie’s premise, about a team of researchers experimenting with a way to record human experiences on tape, feels more real and more relevant today than ever before. The final cut of the film itself is campy and a bit of a mess. Which is why it is perfect for a modern reboot.

The drama of the movie ratchets up as it becomes increasingly clear how dangerous this new tech is, especially after one scientist records herself dying of a heart attack. This recording becomes the crux of the plot, leading to a bizarrely Biblical climax as Christopher Walken’s character experiences his colleague’s journey into the afterlife secondhand.

Brainstorm has a lot of untapped potential. A contemporary update could untangle the messy aspects of the OG film’s plot, while salvaging its thematically relevant aspects and applying them to 21st-century concerns about the mind-body-computer problem. A TV series would allow for a more ensemble cast, while the ’80s movie was a starring vehicle for Walken and Natalie Wood, in her final film role.

Jagged Edge

Directed By Richard Marquand; Written By Joe Esterhas; Starring Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges & More; Released In 1985

Jagged Edge is an underrated mid-80s legal thriller, in which Glenn Close’s defense attorney character Teddy Barnes takes the case of accused of killing his wife, played by Jeff Bridges in a rare villainous performance. That’s right, Bridges’ character, Jack Forrester, is guilty after all, but this is left ambiguous until late in the movie.

As Barnes, Close gives a star-making performance, successfully defending her client, only to have to shoot him dead in the film’s final moments when he brutally attacks her. As dramatic as its ending is, though, Jagged Edge is perhaps best known for a chilling scene that comes shortly before the big reveal.

That is, when Peter Coyote’s character, District Attorney Thomas Krasney, correctly lays out the truth about Forrester’s murder plot to Barnes and the trial’s judge, only to have it dismissed on procedural grounds. Jagged Edge effectively exposes the flaws in the justice system, a perennial theme that makes it ideal for a remake.

No Way Out

Directed By Roger Donaldson; Written By Robert Garland; Starring Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman, & Will Patton; Released In 1987

No Way Out starts as a romance and ends as a spy thriller, featuring an underrated iconic twist ending. In the film, a Navy officer played by Kevin Costner is framed as a Russian agent, and has to go on the run. He is exonerated by the movie’s end, but that just primes viewers for a twist few, if any, saw coming.

That is, the true identity of “Yuri,” the film’s ghost-like Soviet operative. No Way Out impressively hides its swerve in plain sight, until its final moments, when everything clicks into place. Still, the movie leaves plenty of unanswered questions, with plenty of gaps a prestige TV remake could relish filling in.