Martin Scorsese directed his feature-length version of Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte, in 1991, and a 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 recently released criminal they helped imprison.
In the 1991 film, Peck, Mitchum and one of their 1962 costars, Martin Balsam, all made cameos — Easter eggs, if you will (did we even call them that back then?) — that served as a nod to the original. Now, the 2026 limited series Cape Fear is coming to Apple TV, and it’s completely original and pays homage to what came before.
The new version stars Oscar star Amy Adams as Anna Bowden, a former defense attorney 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 the man Anna once defended in a murder case, Max Cady (Javier Bardem, another Oscar winner, whose role in No Country For Old Men is a delightful moppet compared to Cady), has been released from prison after being found not guilty.
At Anna’s suggestion, Cady pleaded guilty, and now she has arrested him and Tom, who was the prosecutor in this case, guilty and wants to make them pay in cruel, very violent ways for the time he spends in prison. Lily Collias and Joe Anders play Tom and Anna’s children, and CCH Pounder stars as Anna’s partner, Noah 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 are out on Apple TV Friday, June 5. New episodes will arrive weekly on Fridays (although, if you’re familiar with Apple TV’s release process, you’ll know they usually air on Thursday nights at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT).
You’ll need an Apple TV subscription to watch Cape Fear, which you can subscribe to through your Apple phone or as an add-on through Prime Video or Roku. The streaming app can also be found on smart TVs 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. Besides Cape Fear, you can watch shows like Severance, The Morning Show, For All Mankind, Sugar, Widow’s Bay and Pluribus. This is also where you can watch every Formula 1 race this season. Save money on a bundle subscription like Apple One, StreamSaver or the Peacock and Apple TV package.
Do we really need a reboot of Cape Fear?
As someone who watched and loved Cape Fear as a kid (who let me do that?!), hearing that a reboot of the classic, Oscar-nominated film was coming out felt…unnecessary? The new series is created by Nick Antosca, a showrunner with a lot 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 show’s press release, Antosca explains that she first saw the 1991 film when she was young, too — “very young” — and something about the revenge story stuck with her. This new version is updated for the 21st century, but many aspects feel familiar, perhaps because Martin Scorsese is the executive producer (along with Steven Spielberg, who was also a producer of the 1991 film), and the same score — albeit slightly reworked — appears in all three Cape Fear projects. In the same way that Jaws’ signature style is those low bass notes that we all know, Max Cady can be identified by the mysterious and haunting brass music of Bernard Herrmann that appears in every iteration of this story.
All of which is to say that, after watching the first few screens of the new show, the new version captures the essential Southern Gothic vibes of the original story, and Bardem is possibly more terrifying than De Niro was as a villain. And in the modern retelling of the story, Anna and Tom are given a complicated backstory of their own, which may 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 another Apple TV thriller, Widow’s Bay, is one of the best TV shows so far this year… if intense, anxiety-inducing thrills are your thing. Both shows are set in coastal towns where danger abounds, and both pay homage to the horror genre. And they both do a great job of making sure I won’t be going on a beach vacation anytime soon.