Who Wants a Third Basic Instinct with Sharon Stone as a Porn Magnate?

In a movie-making era of pre-branded, built-in-audience features, the sequel, remake, and adaptation reign supreme. Why make a brand new movie with brand new characters when you can just recycle old characters? People are leery of strangers, and with good reason: strangers are totally unpredictable, a lesson most of us have been taught since childhood by anxious authority figures. Far better to be ice-picked by someone you know than by someone who isn’t Sharon Stone, which is probably why there’s a rumor afoot that a third Basic Instinct will be exposing its panty-less nethers sometime in the not-so-distant future.

To be clear, the rumor is based solely on Sharon Stone’s avowed interest in reprising her role as brilliant novelist, underwear minimalist, and sociopath Catherine Tramell in follow-up to the much-derided Basic Instinct 2, and much more beloved (and also sort of derided) Basic Instinct. HuffPo entertainment scribe Liz Smith really doubts that a third Basic Instinct will materialize, but Stone has concocted her very own idea for what Tramell has been up to these last few years: managing an internet porn empire. Cool, I guess?

Paul Verhoeven’s wacky, satirizing sensibilities pretty much made the first Basic Instinct as memorable as it is, and it’s unlikely he’d be game for a third movie. Wanna guess why? According to a really awesome before/after article by Dennis Hensley about the release of Showgirls, the Dutch filmmaker did not at all appreciate the way Stone took credit for Basic Instinct’s much-ballyhooed leg-uncrossing scene:

In the case of Sharon, I think she regretted that she had put her trust so much in me and herself at the moment where she opens her legs and she has no panties on. When it happened I think the relationship was such that she felt that it was okay to do so. I think 5 months later when she saw that scene in the presence of her friends her manager and agents, she felt that the situation was so different that she could not accept her openness at the moment that it happened. I think it was feared that people would be abhorred by seeing that and that it would hurt her career. So she tried to make it undone and basically because I felt that it was very important and it had been discussed and she had seen it on the video and had accepted it that it would be too late now to go back. I felt that was not fair. I felt that it should not be taken out and I refused. Ultimately of course, you know that Sharon, after protesting and accusing me of having betrayed her, ultimately the last stand on that story of hers, in the last half year, is that she invented that scene. So now she tells everybody that it was her idea. After two years of accusing me that I betrayed her, she changes her tune and now it’s suddenly her idea. I think she accepts it in her heart because she knows it’s such a strong scene. I think that the strength of the scene is probably proven by the fact that so many people remember that shot of her, and any shot of her sitting in the white dress in the chair is symbolic for sexual power, isn’t it?

Many years have passed, so maybe Stone and Verhoeven will reunite and give us the Basic Instinct follow-up we’ve always deserved — NC-17, with Michael Douglas’ balls everywhere.