Teen Wolf: The Movie will complete a journey that began on the big screen nearly 40 years ago. A 1985 film called Teen Wolf, starring a newly-famous Michael J. Fox, kickstarted the franchise with a very different interpretation. At CCXP 2022, Teen Wolf: The Movie released a poster, hyping fans for the film revival of the 2010s-era series. It began when MTV acquired the rights to the Fox film, but it was the era of True Blood on HBO. Adapting elements from 1980s classics like Stand By Me and The Lost Boys, the show tells its own story so much that the similarities between the movie and TV's Teen Wolf end at the name.
The show was a hit, and it's a basic-cable spin on the violent and sexy horror fantasy endured perhaps beyond the HBO series that kickstarted the trend. Case in point, True Blood is not coming back for a movie. Still, it's interesting to think that the world Jay Davis helped create came from the mind of a post-film school Jeph Loeb and Matthew Weisman. Though, it makes sense that Loeb, who would go on to an illustrious career with superheroes, saw becoming a werewolf as a superpower.
The 1985 Teen Wolf Movie Was as Revolutionary as the 2011 Series
Fans of Styles and the gang likely were turned off when they tuned into Teen Wolf on MTV, as it shared none of the comedy DNA of the first film. Yet, Teen Wolf was equally a sea change for what was expected of a story with that title. Other high school werewolf movies exist, yet as with most stories in the genre, it was a curse. In Teen Wolf, it's, at worst, an annoyance. At best? Michael J. Fox's Scott Howard is a superhero or super basketball player.
The film also works as a satire of the high-school coming-of-age movies, with "being a werewolf" an absurdist element in the familiar tropes. Following the movie, an animated Saturday morning cartoon series debuted, featuring the characters from the film. Scott went to a different high school, but it was a loose enough adaptation that it felt like a sequel for kids who saw a mostly-adult movie. Naturally, with a hit film, they wanted to do a sequel. The only problem was that Michael J. Fox's star had risen considerably, and he felt he'd said all he needed to say about teenage werewolves.
Enter Jason Bateman in Teen Wolf, Too. Since it was an entirely new cast with the same premise, the storytellers essentially told the same story with boxing replacing basketball. It is one of the most universally loathed movies in history, and its legacy is only referenced whenever a film series makes the mistake it did.
Teen Wolf: The Movie Is an Appropriate Title for an Entirely Different Story
MTV's Teen Wolf shares more in common with Syfy's 12 Monkeys, a show that reimagined its source material to tell its own story. Teen Wolf characters share the same names, and Stiles is cool in every universe. Yet, the "Teen Wolf" name and concept lay dormant for decades until Jay Davis dusted it off and decided to take the story seriously. Davis kept Loeb's idea that being a werewolf is akin to having a superpower, but he returned the drama and, more importantly, the horror elements. Just as the first movie changed the way people thought of werewolves, the series changed how people thought about Teen Wolf.
Other than names, the show's story is different from the original. Scott inherits his power in the 1985 movie from his father, but in the 2011 series, he gets bitten. From there, Davis and the other storytellers are off to the races, creating a world that endured long past the heyday of True Blood, Twilight and other stories in the "scary but also sexy" horror genre. It's been so successful that when someone says "teen wolf," they probably mean Tyler Posey more often than Michael J. Fox. Despite the differences in each iteration, there is poetry to the roundabout way Teen Wolf found its way back to the movies. While Teen Wolf: The Movie might technically be the third film in the franchise, it's truly the first film of the definitive version of this story.