I Thought We All Agreed to Leave Point Break Alone

Let's start off by agreeing that this is the worst idea since someone raised their hand in a boardroom and said, "Hey, let's make another Point Break movie." I hated the idea when AMC announced earlier this year that it was developing a Point Break series, but there was still that wonderful little possibility that everybody involved could come to their senses and quietly let it die in development. That possibility is gone now because AMC has officially greenlit the fucking thing.

The series will run eight episodes and take place in the present day, more than 30 years after the original film. A new group of thieves with ties to the Ex-Presidents has appeared, and the FBI turns to a mysterious former professional surfer with a questionable past to infiltrate them. Is there anyone out there who got excited by that? Anyone? No? Dave Kalstein and Christopher C. Rogers are running the series, with production expected to begin in early 2027, but honestly who cares.

They can call it a continuation, a sequel series or whatever else they’d like, but we’ve got another group of criminals, another undercover operation and another surfer being shoved into the middle of it. The Ex-Presidents are back in some form too, which immediately tells me we aren’t just borrowing the basic idea. We’re digging up the whole goddamn graveyard.

Point Break came out in 1991 and gave us Johnny Utah, Bodhi, Pappas, Tyler, presidential masks, bank robberies, surfing, skydiving and absolutely one of the greatest, completely insane action movies ever made. Kathryn Bigelow somehow took all of that shit and made it work without treating any of it like a joke. The movie makes us completely buy in on Bodhi, Utah and this ridiculous world they’re living in, and that’s the main reason why it still works 35 years later for me and anyone else who loves this movie.

The other important reason it works is that it knows when to fucking end. Johnny Utah spends the entire movie getting pulled between the life he’s supposed to be living and everything Bodhi represents, and when he finally tracks Bodhi down at Bells Beach, there’s nowhere else for the story to go.

Bodhi isn’t coming back. Both Utah and Bodhi knew it, and Bodhi gets exactly what he wanted when he paddles out into that massive storm while Utah watches him go. Utah throws his FBI badge into the ocean and walks away, and that’s it. That's all we needed. It never needed a sequel, cartoon, action figures (which I would buy every one of). It knew why it was there, it accomplished it and it got the fuck out.

That’s where Point Break should’ve stayed. I don’t need to know what happened next, I don’t need Bodhi’s legacy explored, and I sure as hell don’t need somebody explaining how a new group of criminals is somehow connected to the Ex-Presidents three and a half decades later. Whatever happened to Johnny Utah after he tossed that badge belongs to Johnny Utah, and I was perfectly happy never knowing.

We’ve actually been through this shit once already. Hollywood remade Point Break in 2015, stripped away almost everything that made the original special, loaded it with bigger extreme-sports sequences and created something that was a hollow shell of the original. Alcon Entertainment was involved with that movie too, and now Alcon Television Group is the lead studio on this new series.

That should’ve been the warning shot. You tried Point Break without Swayze, Reeves, Bigelow and everything that made the original work, and nobody walked away demanding more of it.

What really pisses me off is the language being used around the new show. The people behind it are talking about honoring the original while introducing a “new generation of Ex-Presidents,” and I genuinely can’t think of a phrase that makes me sicker.

The Ex-Presidents weren’t the fucking Avengers, and Bodhi wasn’t Nick Fury assembling the next lineup. They were four surfers robbing banks to finance the way they wanted to live, and once that summer was over, almost all of them were dead. Their story had a beginning, a middle and an ending, which used to be something movies were allowed to have. Hollywood seems terrified of letting a recognizable movie just sit there and be a movie when there might still be a few dollars rattling around inside the title.

Some stories give you a world that can keep expanding because that’s how they were built. Others show up, kick your ass for two hours and leave you with something memorable. Point Break belongs in that second group, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that. Loving something doesn’t mean I need an endless supply of it, especially when the thing I loved had already told the story it came to tell.

I already know one of the responses this will get. The original still exists, nobody is forcing me to watch the series, and maybe the show will actually be good. All of that is true, and none of it makes me want eight episodes about the next generation of fucking Ex-Presidents.

Hopefully the people making it genuinely love Point Break. If they do, I’d rather see them take everything the movie inspired in them and build something new out of it instead of stapling Bodhi’s name and the Ex-Presidents onto another undercover-surfer story.

Bodhi caught his wave, and Utah threw away the badge. That was the ending, and 35 years later it’s still a great fucking ending.