THE FIRST WIVES CLUB 1996
49%
Directed by Hugh Wilson
Written by Robert Harling
Starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, Maggie Smith, Sarah Jessica Parker
Synopsis
When a college friend commits suicide, three divorced women reunite and join forces to honor her memory by getting revenge on the husbands who kicked them to the curb for younger women.
Why We Love It
Pity the poor First Wives Club fan. Almost from the moment the hit comedy was released, rumors of a sequel have swirled. There have been scripts written, scripts rewritten, and scripts trashed, and the three lead actresses have said—multiple times!—they’re game. Netflix even became involved at one point, or so it was reported. And yet here we are, more than two decades later, still wondering what became of Elise (Goldie Hawn), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Annie (Diane Keaton) after they burst through the doors of their newly minted club and down the cobblestone streets of New York, declaring they were young, and they loved to be young; free, and they loved to be free.
Perhaps it’s been wise to leave such a beloved film untouched. (And yes, to all the grumpy critics who dismissed it as fluff upon its release, who moaned about the stereotyping of the husbands and the younger women who stole them, and who wanted a little more bite to the script: the film is almost universally beloved today.) We wouldn’t want, after all, to discover that the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Midler (brash and frumpy at once), Keaton (buttoned-up and nervy), and Hawn (a wonderful mess as a struggling starlet) had somehow been lost. Nor that the film’s rousing message of female empowerment might have dulled with age, or that writer Robert Harling, here adapting Olivia Goldsmith’s book of the same name, might no longer be able to conjure such deliciousness as Elise’s riposte: “I do have feelings: I’m an actress—I have all of them!”
And lord knows how they’d top the sight and sound of Midler, Keaton, and Hawn, each suited up for war in white, belting out Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” Twice.
Turns out there’s a perfect reason for the lack of sequel to this near-perfect film (even we wish the subplot about the women’s shelter felt less throwaway), or, at least, a reason perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the movie. In 2017, Hawn told Total Film magazine that the three women had been offered the same paycheck for a sequel as they had been given for the original—no bump whatsoever—a deal almost unheard of for the stars of a hit film. Certainly unheard of for male stars of a hit film. “It was such an insult,” Hawn said. “It wasn’t about the money, it was about the respect.”
In a boss move worthy of a member of the First Wives Club, Hawn turned down the offer and did The Banger Sisters instead.