The 1990s: A bygone era of mom jeans, hypercolor shirts, and only 151 Pokémon. The decade came roaring back to television screens recently when Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon reunited for Netflix’s psychological apocalyptic freakout, Leave the World Behind.
You can’t reunite without uniting in the first place, leading many viewers to ask themselves which project Bacon and Roberts had teamed up for in the ‘90s. It’s easy to lose track of these things. The whole decade was a blur. We were all out of our minds on Surge Cola and Sprinklin’s Yogurt. Don’t worry, boo. We’ve got you.
Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon’s Flatliners: A severe concussion of a movie
Flatliners is one of those movies that, if you don’t remember to watch it every couple of years, starts to feel like a weird dream you had while you were getting your wisdom teeth out. Directed by Joel “Sorry about Batman and Robin” Schumacher and — spitting in the face of the odds — not based on a short story by Stephen King, it stars both Bacon and Roberts, alongside Kiefer Sutherland. Other, more surreal credits include “young Oliver Platt” and “Billy Baldwin in an actual movie.”
The story follows a group of medical students who get up to some malarkey, deciding to try to find out what’s on the other side of mortality by stopping their hearts, then resuscitating one another at the last possible second. This sort of behavior doesn’t just confirm that kids were stupid before TikTok challenges. It also, as tends to happen in horror movies about science, makes some magic happen. The fresh-faced thrill seekers soon find themselves bringing something back with them from the other side. Everyone gets a bad case of the jeeblies. Jeeblies, all around.
Flatliners didn’t set the box office on fire when it hit theaters in 1990. On a budget of $26 million, it pulled in a little over $61 million. Similarly, despite finding some cult appreciation later down the road, it was met with less than stunning reviews, splitting critics on Rotten Tomatoes directly down the middle with a 50% approval rating. It’s about as obscure as a film can be while still featuring some of the biggest stars of its day.
Still, if there’s one thing that studios have agreed on over the last 20 years, it’s that you don’t need an audience to recognize your property to try and cash in on audience recognition. In 2017, Elliot Page and Diego Luna starred in a soft remake/sequel to Flatliners, also called Flatliners. The film was shot for less than the original ($19 million) and made less at the box office ($45 million). Kiefer Sutherland returned. Roberts and Bacon were unavailable. It’s unclear whether anyone bothered to try to get Billy Baldwin on the horn.