‘Cruel Intentions’ TV Series Set at Amazon
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It’ll soon be time to meet two new step-siblings who will do whatever it takes.
Amazon has ordered a TV series based on the 1999 movie Cruel Intentions, according to TVLine. Production on the eight-episode series will reportedly begin in early June in Toronto. It’s unclear yet if this Cruel Intentions will be available to stream on Prime Video or Freevee; it had originally been in the works for the latter (when it was IMDb TV before the rebranding).
While the film (in which Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe played the step-siblings) took place in New York City, the series will be in Washington, D.C. It will follow “two ruthless step-siblings who will do anything to stay at the top of the Greek Life hierarchy at their elite college. When a brutal hazing incident threatens the entire Panhellenic system, they’ll do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and reputations… including seducing the daughter of the U.S. vice president,” according to the report. The film saw Phillippe’s character trying to seduce Reese Witherspoon’s, who was the prep school headmaster’s daughter. Casting for the new show has yet to be announced.
This is the first series order for a TV adaptation of the film but not the first attempt. NBC had a pilot in 2016 that would have been a sequel, with Gellar reprising her role, but it didn’t move forward. It would have followed Gellar’s Kathryn “as she vies for control of Valmont International as well as the soul of Bash Casey, the son of her brother, who was the late Sebastian Valmont, and Annette Hargrove.”
“It was really a space issue,” then NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke explained of the network not putting it in its fall schedule that year. “We had a spot for a big great soap, and This is Us seemed to fit better.”
And while Gellar is not going to be part of this new series, it will fit with the vision she had shared she had for an adaptation of the film. As she told the New York Times in September 2022, she thought that it should be “straight streaming.”
And Cruel Intentions 2, which starred Robin Dunne and Amy Adams as the characters played by Phillippe and Gellar and showed how they met, started as a prequel for Fox in 1999. Once it was canceled prior to its premiere, the episodes completed became the 2001 film.
