The Bonfire of the Vanities: The Bestseller Turned Megaflop Is Being Made Into a Series By Matt Reeves

In 1990, Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis were two of the biggest stars in the world. Tom Hanks was coming off an Oscar nomination for Big, while Bruce Willis had broken out as a movie star thanks to the smash success of Die Hard. But both actors wanted to be perceived as “serious,” and as such, they signed on to co-star in one of the most ambitious films of the era, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Add Melanie Griffith, fresh off Working Girl, to the mix and, seemingly, you had a can’t-miss megahit.

The film would be based on the best-selling 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe, which concerned a yuppie, Sherman McCoy, whose life unravels after a hit-and-run accident, after which he’s put on trial. The film is a scathing satire of New York high society in the eighties and yuppie culture, with Hanks playing McCoy while Willis played a dissolute journalist, Peter Fallow, chronicling his downfall. The movie was one of the biggest disasters of the era, only making $15 million on a $47 million budget, while it was reviled critically. Were that not enough, its reputation got even worse when a book called The Devil’s Candy, by journalist Julie Salamon, was released, chronicling the disastrous production. Brian De Palma, in a move he would come to regret, had granted Salamon complete access to the production. The resulting book was scandalous, reflecting poorly on its stars and giving the film a reputation for being the biggest Hollywood disaster since Heaven’s Gate.

Yet now, none other than The Batman director Matt Reeves seems eager to take his own crack at The Bonfire of the Vanities, with THR reporting the director, along with David E. Kelley, is looking to turn it into a limited series for Apple TV+. Now, the series will likely have nothing to do with the film, with them going back to Wolfe’s acclaimed novel. Kelley has had success with this in the past, with Presumed Innocent having been a streaming hit. It was also based on a book that received a film adaptation—although in that case, the movie was a classic. Kelley also adapted another of Wolfe’s novels, A Man in Full, for Netflix in 2024.

To some extent, I can understand why Kelley and Reeves are taking a stab at Bonfire, as despite being set in the eighties, the premise—which deals with the class divide, media outrage, and even, in a fashion, cancel culture—is still relevant today. Sherman McCoy would be a juicy role for anyone to take on, but it’s also a highly unsympathetic part. When they made it into a movie, they softened the character to fit Hanks’ image, and it was disastrous (they also completely rewrote the Peter Fallow character to tailor it to Willis’s Moonlighting-era wisecracking style).

In some ways, remaking a terrible movie—which has good source material—makes more sense than remaking a classic. A limited series format is also better than a two-hour feature for such a sprawling story. As for the movie itself, one can’t say it hurt Hanks or Willis. Hanks eventually made a successful leap to drama with Philadelphia, while Willis continued his rise as one of the biggest action stars of all time. Of all of them, perhaps the flop hit Melanie Griffith the hardest, while De Palma also suffered a lag in his career before bouncing back with one of his best movies, Carlito’s Way. Sometimes, a disaster ends up being a huge creative shot in the arm, doesn’t it?

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