Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Didn’t Need to Be a Franchise, But I’m Kinda Glad it Became One

Rosemary’s Baby holds a special place in my heart. It was one of the first horror films I ever saw and also one of my first R-rated films. As I recall, my mother saw it in college and was terribly unsettled by it—as were most folks back then—and so my parents thought it’d be worth my time and up my alley.¹ Boy, were they right. It’s still one of my favorite films to this day.

It’s also the flagship film of a franchise. Reader, did you realize there was a Rosemary’s Baby franchise even before the 2024 prequel? Only the most hardcore cinema sickos could recall each entry by name—a test that I couldn’t pass a week ago. Perhaps because the original film was the only one actually released in movie theaters.

After the flagship adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel, there was the superbly titled Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, which aired on TV as the ABC Friday Night Movie for October 29, 1976.² Patty Duke stars as Rosemary, and Ruth Gordon was the only actor from the original film to reprise her role (as Minnie Castevet).³ And then, nearly four decades later, there was the 2014 two-part NBC miniseries also called Rosemary’s Baby starring Zoe Saldaña. If you’re keeping score at home, yes, Mia Farrow is now the only actress to play Rosemary Woodhouse who hasn’t won an Academy Award. What a world. Anyway, neither of these projects were well received, as you can imagine.

And then there’s last year’s Apartment 7A, which is also destined to fade into obscurity—not because it’s bad (I kinda dug it), but because it’s largely forgettable, especially with that unremarkable title. Sturdy performances from Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest will probably be the only things I can recall about it a year from now. Will it be the final installment of the Rosemary’s Baby franchise? Probably not. (I hear Levin’s sequel novel Son of Rosemary is pretty crazy.)

When you add it all up, the Rosemary saga is less a franchise than a shark with a few barnacles attached to it. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

On the surface, there’s the immediate tangential value of a new property that’s connected to an older masterpiece. Even if Apartment 7A had an unceremonious rollout, premiering at Fantastic Fest before being dumped onto Paramount+ a week later, it’s still out there in the world being watched by hundreds of thousands of people. And if that means thousands of people discovering Rosemary’s Baby for the first time, then I’m grateful it exists no matter how successful it is.

But there’s a deeper value to it. Last year, I wrote about 12 Angry Men (1997) and how remakes can be valuable when the stories are contemporized for modern audiences. This is partially true in the case of Apartment 7A. On one hand, the story takes place immediately before Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into the building, so the setting and the plot haven’t been modernized at all. On the other hand, the dynamics behind the camera have changed quite a bit since Rosemary’s Baby was made almost 60 years ago.

Perhaps this is the right place to bring up Roman Polanski. Unfortunately, the talented writer and director of Rosemary’s Baby and other legitimate masterpieces is also a really, really bad person who’s been convicted of many horrendous things. That’s not an easy thing for fans of his work like myself to reckon with.⁴ Sure, I’m not sitting around thinking to myself “Is it still okay to enjoy Rosemary’s Baby? Should I light my Criterion Blu-ray on fire?” But it’s a pretty awful asterisk that looms over the film’s legacy.

And that’s the heart of the matter for me when it comes to Apartment 7A. Because I don’t think we should be asking “Can this film improve upon the original?” whenever a new remake or sequel drops.⁵ We should be asking “Will this film strengthen the original film’s legacy?”

I don’t expect any new rendition to match the craft of Rosemary’s Baby. But we can always change the conversation around it. Apartment 7A might be a very similar story of a woman being driven mad by sinister and oppressive forces, but because Natalie Erika James was in the writer’s room and the director’s chair, the perspective has evolved in a useful way.⁶ Maybe Polanski’s authorship over Rosemary’s Baby can never fully be extricated, but James—and even Agnieszka Holland, the director of the 2014 miniseries—provided a lens that can help us frame the original film in a new light.

In fact, I kinda love the idea of younger viewers watching Apartment 7A and then going back and watching Rosemary’s Baby with these things in mind. It’d be a cinematic experience and a history lesson at the same time. Now if only we can get another Chinatown sequel…

Rosemary’s Baby is now streaming on Paramount+, the Criterion Channel, and Hoopla, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. My mother also has a set of plates that are identical to the plates used in a dinner scene in Rosemary’s Baby. I have always been more excited by this than anyone else.

2. Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby was released just four months after The Omen, and the similarities are palpable. I’m sure this timing hurt its critical reception quite a bit, but given the box office success of The Omen, I bet it also brought in lots of home viewers.

3. Daniel Goodwin of Scream magazine called this made-for-TV sequel “a gauche and bumbling chase movie/disco horror hybrid.” Unsurprisingly, this review made me even more curious to see the film. (I watched it. It’s very bad. Wish we had more disco horror movies though.)

4. I have a copy of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read. By all accounts, it’s a great read, and I’m extra curious to dig through the Polanski chapter(s).

5. Is it “legacyquel” or “legasequel”? Have we officially decided? I think I prefer the former but I just want to get it right.

6. I think The First Omen, Arkasha Stevenson’s 2024 legacyquel to The Omen, did a similar thing (and more successfully). There’s a moment in that film that I’ll never forget, and one that I’m thankful a woman directed.