Martin Scorsese directed his feature-length version of Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte, in 1991, and it was a remake of the 1962 version with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. The story in both films was the same: A lawyer named Sam Bowden and his family are terrorized by a newly-released criminal they helped send to prison.
In the 1991 film, Peck, Mitchum and another of their 1962 co-stars, Martin Balsam, all made cameos — Easter eggs, if you will (did we even call them that then?) — that served as a knowing nod to the original. Now, a 2026 limited series of Cape Fear is arriving on Apple TV, and it’s both completely original and a deferential homage to what came before.
The new version stars Oscar winner Amy Adams as Anna Bowden, a former defense lawyer married to a prosecutor, Tom (Patrick Wilson). The couple and their two children live in Savannah, Georgia. They get an unpleasant shock when they learn that a man Anna once defended in a murder trial, Max Cady (Javier Bardem, another Oscar winner, whose role in No Country For Old Men is a cheerful moppet compared to Cady), has been released from prison after it’s surfaced he didn’t do the crime.
At Anna’s suggestion, Cady had pleaded guilty, and now he holds her and Tom, who was the prosecutor in the case, responsible and wants to make them pay in the most brutal, violent ways possible for the time he spent locked up. Lily Collias and Joe Anders play Tom and Anna’s children, and C.C.H. Pounder stars as Anna’s colleague, Noa Toussaint. You can also expect to see appearances from Ron Perlman, Malia Pyles, Anna Baryshnikov and Patrick Fischler.
When to stream Cape Fear on Apple TV
The first two episodes of Cape Fear drop on Apple TV on Friday, June 5. New episodes will arrive weekly on Fridays (although, if you’re familiar with Apple TV’s rollout process, you’ll know they typically drop Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT).
You’ll need an Apple TV subscription to watch Cape Fear, which you can sign up for via your Apple device or as an add-on through Prime Video or Roku. The streaming app can also be found on smart TV and media players such as the Amazon Fire Stick. If you’re trying to save money, there’s also an Apple TV and Peacock bundle.
An Apple TV subscription costs $13 a month, and new subscribers get a free seven-day trial. In addition to Cape Fear, you can watch shows such as Severance, The Morning Show, For All Mankind, Sugar, Widow’s Bay and Pluribus. It’s also where you can watch every Formula 1 race this season. Save money on a subscription with a bundle such as Apple One, StreamSaver or the Peacock and Apple TV package.
Do we really need a Cape Fear reboot?
As someone who watched and loved Cape Fear as a kid (who let me do that?!), hearing that a reboot of a classic, Oscar-nominated film was coming out felt… unnecessary? The new series was developed by Nick Antosca, a producer-showrunner with plenty of horror under his belt. (He previously worked on Hulu’s The Act, Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavor and the Chucky TV series on Syfy.)
In the press materials for the show, Antosca explains that he first watched the 1991 movie as a kid, too — “way too young” — and something about the revenge story stuck with him. This new version is updated for the 21st century, but many elements feel familiar, perhaps thanks to the fact that Martin Scorsese is executive producing (along with Steven Spielberg, who was also a producer on the 1991 film), and the same score — albeit reworked a bit — appears in all three Cape Fear projects. In the same way that Jaws’ approach is signaled by those low bass notes we all know, Max Cady can be identified with Bernard Herrmann’s unmistakable and ominous brass melody that features in every iteration of this story.
All of this is to say that, after watching the first few screeners for the new show, the new version captures the essential Southern Gothic vibes of the original story, and Bardem is possibly even more terrifying than De Niro was as a villain. And in a modern update to the story, Anna and Tom are given a complicated backstory themselves, which doesn’t mean they deserve Max’s wrath, but their imperfect behavior adds layers to the story.
I approached Cape Fear with caution, but there was no need. The show, along with Apple TV’s other great thriller, Widow’s Bay, is one of the best TV shows so far this year… if tense, anxiety-inducing thrills are your thing. Both shows are set in coastal towns where danger is afoot, and both pay homage to the horror genre. And both are doing a great job ensuring I won’t be going on a beach vacation any time soon.
