Remember What Women Want? In case the past 17 years have been busy and you need a refresher on the 2000 Nancy Meyers romcom, here’s the deal: Mel Gibson plays a sexist, self-absorbed advertising executive who is so baffled by the opposite sex that it takes a freak accident allowing him toread women’s mindsbefore he can register them as fellow humans worthy of a baseline level of respect.
He then uses that power to market things to them! Somewhere along the way, he also bonds with his teenage daughter and falls in love with his boss, played by Helen Hunt, who he’s initially so threatened by that he employs his mind-reading abilities to steal her ideas and get her fired. She, for some reason, decides to overlook this indiscretion and they end up together.
It’s not, as Jezebel points out, a movie that holds up particularly well in the year 2017. But a gender-flipped version starring Taraji P. Henson? Now that’s more like it. According to Deadline, the aptly-titled What Men Want will star Henson as “afemale sports agent who has been constantly boxed out by her male colleagues. When she gains the power to hear men’s thoughts, she is able to shift the paradigm to her advantage as she races to sign the NBA’s next superstar. ”
The film is set to be released onJanuary 11, 2019, which means we have just a little over a year to wait to get our sneak peek at the rich interior lives of men. Oh, and to watch Henson use her psychic abilities to, hopefully, subvert some of the Hollywood gender stereotypes the original film was packed with once and for all.
