The 2018 Remake Overboard (1987)
In May 2018 — just over thirty years after the original — Pantelion Films and MGM released Overboard, a Spanish-English bilingual remake directed by Rob Greenberg, written by Greenberg and Bob Fisher and Leslie Dixon (the original's screenwriter, credited for the underlying material), and starring Anna Faris as Kate, a working-class single mother of three, and Eugenio Derbez as Leonardo, the spoiled heir of a Mexican shipping fortune. The remake reverses the gender of the lead and the amnesiac, and reframes the class line as the US-Mexico immigration line.
The reversal: working-class woman kidnaps wealthy man
The 2018 plot. Leonardo Montenegro (Derbez) is a wealthy playboy on his yacht in coastal Oregon (the Pacific Northwest setting carries over from the original). Kate Sullivan (Faris) is a Latina nursing-school student supporting three daughters by working multiple cleaning jobs, including a carpet-cleaning gig aboard Leonardo's yacht. Leonardo stiffs her on payment and pushes her overboard with her equipment. That night Leonardo himself falls off the yacht and is fished out of the bay with no memory.
Kate, on the news of the unidentified amnesiac, sees an opportunity. With the help of her friend Theresa (Eva Longoria), she shows up at the hospital with fabricated photos and claims Leonardo as her husband. She conscripts him into life with three young daughters, into manual labor on a construction site to support the household, and into the working-class life Kate has been doing alone for years. The Stayton-Proffitt vector is reversed: the wealthy character is the kidnapped amnesiac, the working-class character is the kidnapper.
Why the reversal mattered to the press cycle
The 2018 remake was framed in the press explicitly as a fix to the 1987 original's premise. The argument: in the original, a working-class man kidnaps a wealthy woman, which produces a power-asymmetry the screwball-comedy form has trouble metabolizing in the post-MeToo era. In the remake, a working-class woman kidnaps a wealthy man, which inverts the asymmetry and (the argument went) made the premise palatable to a 2018 audience.
A.O. Scott, in The New York Times review, treated the reversal as the remake's animating idea:
"The 1987 Overboard sits oddly in the canon of 1980s comedies — too sweet to be a class-war satire, too uncomfortable to be a pure romance, too well-acted to dismiss. ... The 2018 version's most interesting move is the reversal. By switching the genders of kidnapper and kidnapped, the remake makes the original's discomfort visible as discomfort. You can't watch the new film without thinking about the old one, and you can't think about the old one without seeing what was always strange about it." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2018)
The reversal also did real cultural work in another direction. The remake's bilingual cast and Pantelion Films distribution made it one of the first major-studio US-Mexico-coproduction romantic comedies pitched explicitly at both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking American audiences. Eugenio Derbez had been one of the highest-grossing Mexican stars of the prior decade (Instructions Not Included, 2013, $44 million domestic), and the remake was as much a Derbez vehicle for the Latin American market as it was a Faris vehicle for the US market.
What the remake kept and what it changed
The remake retained the structural skeleton of the original almost beat-for-beat. The yacht scene, the deck-shove, the amnesiac on the news, the hospital claim, the fabricated photos, the chore-list day, the breakdown, the silent commitment, the household montage, the held confession, the photo identification by the family, the memory return, the falling-action / inheritance test, the climactic jump (rewritten as a different physical gesture but structurally the same), the wind-down with the rich-twist (also adjusted): all present.
What changed besides gender and language:
- The chore list became construction work. The reversal of the original's domestic-labor extraction is that the amnesiac man is conscripted into a construction crew, working alongside Theresa's husband Bobby. The film's working-class register is built site rather than kitchen.
- Three daughters instead of four sons. Kate's daughters are Molly, Emily, and Olivia; the original's four boys are reduced to three girls, with the youngest carrying the bracelet equivalent (a friendship-bracelet rather than macaroni).
- The thesis line is dropped. The remake does not have an Andrew-equivalent and does not have a "rare privilege of escaping your bonds" speech. The 1987 film's structural thesis is articulated; the 2018 film's structural thesis is implicit.
- The wind-down is gentler. The original's "the boat, the money, everything is mine" gag is replaced with a quieter resolution: Leonardo retains his wealth but stays with Kate's family on his own moral terms, and Kate finishes nursing school. The 2018 wind-down is closer to romantic-comedy-resolution conventional and farther from the screwball-comedy permission-to-keep-the-money convention.
The reception was mixed-positive and the box office was solid
The 2018 Overboard opened May 4, 2018 to a 24% Rotten Tomatoes critical score (the same range as the 1987 original) and a 72% audience score. It grossed $50 million domestic and $91 million worldwide on a reported $12 million budget — a clear commercial success and one of Pantelion Films' biggest releases. The Latin American box office (particularly Mexico) was a substantial portion of the international gross. (box office mojo)
The critical conversation generally treated the remake as competent rather than essential. The reversal got more press than the execution.
"The remake works hard to address what was problematic about the original, and largely succeeds. What it doesn't have is the 1987 version's secret weapon — Hawn and Russell as a real couple, doing the work without having to perform it. Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez are both terrific. They are not, between them, what Hawn and Russell were." — Tirhakah Love, Vulture (2018)
The remake confirmed the original's cult status
The most durable effect of the 2018 remake was on the 1987 original's reputation. The press cycle around the remake — every major review framed the remake as response to the original — had the side effect of treating the 1987 Overboard as a recognized cultural text rather than a half-remembered 1980s comedy. The 30th-anniversary retrospective wave in 2017 and the remake-press wave in 2018 collectively established the original's cult status in the form it now occupies. See Critical Reception and Legacy (Overboard).
Goldie Hawn declined to appear in or comment publicly on the remake. Kurt Russell made a brief positive comment in passing on a press tour for an unrelated project. The original's screenwriter Leslie Dixon received a "based on the screenplay by" credit and was briefly involved in early development.