Like its duelling antiheroines, Death Becomes Her refuses to die. There might not be quite the same stickiness or, unfairly, respect as that afforded to some of its 90s comedy peers but it’s lingered around the outskirts anyway, with drag tributes or Halloween costumes or comparisons to Real Housewives stars or, most recently, similarities to The Substance (it’s the infinitely better movie).
The themes, of ageing anxieties and the cruel impossibility of beauty standards, are also never going away – if anything they’ve become more centre-staged – and so some sort of reimagining has felt inevitable for a while (rumours of a remake have circulated for years). It tracks that a rebirth on Broadway would come next, with both the conveyor belt of screen-to-stage adaptations refusing to slow down and the original’s brash theatrical humour making it a perfect fit. Success was far less inevitable though given the quality of many examples that came before it, from Pretty Woman to Mrs Doubtfire to, bafflingly, Indecent Proposal.
