After nearly 35 years, Joe Eszterhas is back to basics with the follow-up to his 1992 erotic thriller.
The Basic Instinct screenwriter, who was tapped to pen a reboot for Amazon MGM Studio’s United Artists last year, has given an update on the script, which features the onscreen return of Catherine Tramell (infamously originated by Sharon Stone).
“They came to me and asked, ‘Do you have any ideas for this?’” Eszterhas recalled to Interview Magazine. “And I said, ‘I do.’ I really talked about bare bones. As you know, after Basic, there was a so-called sequel. … it’s really bad.”
In 2006, Sharon Stone reprised her iconic role for the Michael Caton-Jones-helmed sequel, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, which was written by Leora Barish (Desperately Seeking Susan) and Henry Bean (Noise). The sequel grossed only $38M worldwide, compared to the $352M success of the original.
“They paid me a million five to have nothing to do with it,” said Eszterhas of the sequel. “It’s easy money. Nobody said this to me, but I didn’t think they wanted to take the kind of creative chances the original did. They didn’t want controversy. What they did was turn it into a bland police procedural. They set it in London and the whole piece was really boring. It didn’t have any humor. It didn’t have the spice and earth and wit of the original. In the 30 years since it came out, I went through a lot of Basic Instinct revivals and saw audiences who just adored the fucking movie.”
Sharon Stone in ‘Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction’ (2006) (MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection)
After announcing his work on the pending reboot last summer, Eszterhas told Interview that his condition was the update has to “be fun and enjoyable. I just finished the script and we’ll see.”
“Catherine Tramell is in this one, and so is a new character, her daughter, Jezebel,” added Eszterhas. “I can’t say too much about it.”
In July 2025, Eszterhas revealed that he’s working on a “wild and orgasmic ride” for the United Artists reboot, which is produced by UA’s Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt, with Vault Entertainment’s Craig Baumgarten and Adam Griffin, who is executive producing via the banner.
When asked about the reboot, Stone agreed with Eszterhas that it better outperform the 2006 sequel. “If it goes the way the one that I was in, I would just say, I don’t know why you’d do it. I mean, go ahead. Good f*cking luck,” she said in August.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, Basic Instinct starred Michael Douglas as Detective Nick Curran and Stone as his case’s seductive prime suspect Catherine Tramell, a manipulative crime novelist who is the prime suspect in the brutal killing of a rockstar.
