Catherine Tramell in a ponytail and a truck-stop windbreaker is apparently the pitch.
Word out of Los Angeles this week is that a new Aileen Wuornos project is circling A-list talent, and the town is already doing what it always does with a woman who killed seven men: sanding off the horror and hunting for cheekbones.
For anyone under thirty who knows Wuornos only as a Halloween costume with bad intentions, the short version.
She was a Florida highway sex worker who shot seven men between 1989 and 1990, claimed self-defense, and was executed by the state in 2002.
Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing her in *Monster*, gaining thirty pounds and vanishing into prosthetics in a performance that still holds up as one of the best of the 2000s.
That movie came out in 2003, and it already did the definitive version.
So what does a second bite at this apple offer besides a fresh awards-season campaign and a director's reel?
Somebody's team is leaking that their client is "deeply researching the role," which is publicist for "please put us in the conversation." There's also chatter about whether the family of one of the victims has been consulted, and the answer, per the usual Hollywood math, is probably a very polite silence.
Here's the thing the industry keeps forgetting.
Theron's performance worked because it was ugly, unglamorous, and refused to make Wuornos likable.
The second a stylist gets involved and the trailer starts, you get the same tired arc: traumatized woman, tragic circumstances, slow-motion cigarette.
True crime is a billion-dollar content machine, and streamers are strip-mining every notorious woman who ever picked up a weapon.
Wuornos is a name that still sells tabloid covers two decades after her death.
Somewhere a development exec is calling that "IP." The wildest part?
Wuornos herself spent her final years furious at how she was portrayed, ranting at interviews and distrusting everyone who tried to tell her story.
She was, by every account, complicated, volatile, and genuinely dangerous.
A movie that smooths that into a triumphant Oscar reel is a movie that lies.
Final Thoughts
The closing thought: if this thing actually gets made, the lead actress will do the press tour in a borrowed couture gown and call the role "transformative." Meanwhile the seven dead men, and the woman who was executed for killing them, will stay exactly where Hollywood prefers them — as material.