Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You remains one of the key definitions of a “star is born” performance. Tall, handsome, with blush-worthy levels of camera-ready magnetism, Ledger sauntered into the pop-culture consciousness in 1999 as a chain-smoking (rumoured) bad boy teen paid to take an arty cool girl (the similarly luminous Julia Stiles) to prom. Allowed to retain his Aussie accent, Ledger is ludicrously charismatic in the film, all lackadaisical flirtation and alluring ambivalence. Can you even imagine 10 Things… without him? Well, imagine no more: a Heath-less reboot is in development. Is nothing sacred etc...?
Despite celebrity deaths typically halting unasked-for revivals in their tracks (remember how close we got to a second Mrs Doubtfire in the months before Robin Williams’s death in 2014?), a trilogy of sequels to 10 Things I Hate About You is coming down the pipe. The original film’s director Gil Junger has confirmed that each new movie will explore different stages of adult life, which will be reflected in their respective titles: 10 Things I Hate About Dating; 10 Things I Hate About Marriage; and 10 Things I Hate About Kids. How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
Junger said that he is open to cast members from the first film returning for “cameos” or “small parts”, mentioning Larry Miller by name – the actor who played father to Stiles’s moody wallflower. Absent, though, obviously, would be Ledger, who died in 2008 at the depressingly young age of 28. But don’t worry, Junger told the magazine People, it’d be “a beautiful idea” to somehow nod to Ledger in the new movies, adding: “He deserves to be loved.”
Sure! But isn’t there something particularly grim about this, even for an age in which absolutely every bit of pre-existing intellectual property (IP) – The Bodyguard (maybe) with Taylor Swift! Single White Female with Jenna Ortega! Legally Blonde without Reese Witherspoon! – is being strip-mined for parts? 10 Things wasn’t a film led by its premise, which more or less mirrored the conventions of every other major teen movie in 1999: finding love through deception, prom night entanglements, enemies to lovers, Shakespeare-aping silliness (as any GCSE English student will tell you, its plot was inspired by The Taming of the Shrew). What made it a generational classic was Ledger and Stiles, two preternaturally gifted young actors with intelligence and wit in spades, along with the particularly skilled cast that surrounded them (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gabrielle Union and David Krumholtz). And it was also down to the unusually thoughtful, character-driven script by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, who made sure that Stiles’s moody Kat Stratford was never shamed for being a snarky, alternative bookworm, or transformed – She’s All That-style – into something more aggressively conventional.
McCullah and Smith are, at this point, not involved in the revival, suggesting this is very much a Gil Junger project. And you can hardly blame his eagerness. Junger, whose last significant movie was 2001’s Martin Lawrence medieval romp Black Knight, has been attempting to mount 10 Things reboots since 2009, first with a short-lived TV series inspired by the film (you probably don’t remember it either), then in 2012 with the film sequel 10 Things I Hate About Life starring Evan Rachel Wood. If that’s inspired you to say “huh?”, it’s because it never got finished – production was cancelled two months into filming.
I understand the impulse for a filmmaker to try and further monetise his biggest hit, but 10 Things I Hate About You isn’t an incredibly flexible bit of IP that can exist as little more than a brand name. It is specific and singular, something only crystallised by the death of its biggest name. I also can’t see anyone being particularly interested in it, either. Without Ledger, there won’t even be the slim pleasure of watching old castmates reuniting (which seems to be the sole impetus behind the forthcoming Freakier Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan).
It’ll just be the most currently unemployed cast members from a perfect film from 25 years ago, vainly attempting to resurrect its magic – and what a miserable idea that is.
