Cape Fear is one of those stories that springs eternal. It began as a novel, written by John D. MacDonald and published in 1957; Gregory Peck starred in the first adaptation in 1962. Then came Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake, which featured Robert De Niro as a sadistic ex-con bent on getting revenge against the prosecutor who put him away. While that cat-and-mouse dynamic has always been at the center of this story, each incarnation of Cape Fear has subtly updated its themes (and horrors) for each era — and showrunner Nick Antosca intends to do the same.
Antosca has partnered with Apple TV, Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg to reboot Cape Fear on the small screen. The 10-episode series will premiere on the streamer in June 2026, but Apple unveiled a first look during the Apple TV press day this week. There, Antosca teased his plans for the new Cape Fear alongside its stars, Amy Adams and The Conjuring’s Patrick Wilson. The duo play a pair of happily-married lawyers whose idyllic life immediately unravels when Max Cady (Bardem), the notorious serial murderer they convicted years prior, is released from prison.
The teaser unveiled during the press day shows us Bardem as we’ve never seen him, with an uncanny, icy-blue stare and tattoos of eyes etched all down his back. It’s clear this version of Cape Fear means to tackle our present-day obsession with true crime and charismatic felons — but is this the kind of story that can be stretched out across 10 episodes?
Antosca, for his part, knows that adapting Cape Fear into a series comes with some degree of risk. The writer admitted that previous versions of the story could focus all their energy on immediate, “elemental terror,” maintaining heightened tension throughout a two-hour runtime. A figure like Max Cady is a lightning rod that influences most of those films’ scariest scenes — and that fear is tangible from the moment he first appears on-screen. This version of Cape Fear, meanwhile, focuses more on the intangible.
“The show, to me, is about ambient dread,” Antosca explained. “It reflects the atmosphere of being alive in 2026, with its uncertainties and ambiguities and paranoia.”
This new take on MacDonald’s tale will have more time to explore the subtler ways that Cady’s reappearance incites fear and shatters a tight-knit family. For Wilson, most horror can be distilled into “a family drama,” and Cape Fear definitely fits the bill. Anna (Adams) and Tom Bowden (Wilson) have two teenage daughters, who’ll likely get their own focus in the series. This reboot is shaping up to be a bit more complicated than your average revenge story — but if you’re going to update a classic, you’ve got to make some gutsy changes.
