The 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair is a sexy, adult drama, can a new reboot match its heat?

Every three decades, we get another version of The Thomas Crown Affair.

The 1968 original starred Steve McQueen as a bored millionaire banker who plans and executes a bank robbery by recruiting five strangers who never meet each other or him. When he becomes entangled with an insurance investigator played by Faye Dunaway, it becomes a seduction, culminating in a very sexual-but-without-any-actual-sex chess game.

When Pierce Brosnan wanted to remake the McQueen version in the late 1990s, he was initially daunted by the prospect, because how do you match the King of Cool?

Now, there’s another iteration in the works, a long-gestating project Michael B. Jordan has been trying to get up for years, with himself in the title role and now with Adria Arjona cast as his counter, the woman who could best Thomas Crown. It’s due for release in 2027.

Arjona only just joined the project, having replaced Taylor Russell. Russell is a superb actor, and if you were lucky enough to have seen her on stage at the National Theatre in London in The Effect, you know this as fact.

But Russell, 31, despite being only two years younger than Arjona, plays young. She has this vulnerable innocence that makes it hard to see her as the confident and tough investigator Dunaway and Rene Russo so memorably inhabited.

Dunaway was only 27 when The Thomas Crown Affair was released, but she had this inner grit and sensuality that Arjona will be able to channel. She and Jordan feels evenly matched.

That’s key to the success of any version of The Thomas Crown Affair. You have to buy that these are two equally ambitious, competent and smart people who could best the other, and who would prove irresistible to each other.

That’s the conflict in the film – whether they could overcome their own need to win to be open to ceding control to someone else.

It might be blasphemous to say this, but the 1999 version is just as good, if not better than the McQueen and Dunaway match-up thanks to Brosnan and Russo’s palpable chemistry.

Not for nothing, they were both in their mid-40s when they made this film, and they both looked and acted like people who were in their 40s, not like the current era of arrested development among middle-aged Hollywood stars.

Brosnan’s Thomas Crown and Russo’s Catherine Banning were adults who had lived a life before they were ever put in each other’s paths. They knew about culture and the world, and they had the earnt confidence to take each other on.

They were also properly sexy – that staircase encounter, ye gods. Brosnan was just about to release his third Bond movie and he had banked the goodwill of that beloved franchise while Russo just oozed charisma.

Russo’s Catherine also had the most stealth wealth wardrobe full of beautiful textured fabrics in autumnal hues as she strode and slinked through the upper echelons of Manhattan. She could crash any party because she looked like she belonged there.

Her onscreen wardrobe was provided by Celine, which at the time had Michael Kors as its ready-to-wear creative head, long before he became aspirational to suburbanites shopping in discount outlets.

But what was clever about The Thomas Crown Affair was to almost lower the stakes so there were fewer ethical quagmires for the audience to wade through. While the McQueen version had Thomas Crown plan a violent bank robbery (someone was even shot during the process) just for kicks, the filmmakers in the 1990s recognised how problematic that was.

So, they switched the plot to an art heist, which, if you were to believe Denis Leary’s police detective character, is just a bunch of silly rich people frothing over swirls of paint. Thomas Crown was upgraded to a billionaire, no longer played polo (he prefers sailing), and was personally involved in the theft, which makes him a more active participant.

The final caper with the many human copies of Maigret’s Son of Man is a nice touch, a commentary on his profession in mergers and acquisitions.

Only a decade out of the 1980s Wall Street culture, someone in M&A is probably the most aggressive kind of corporate vulture (he seems to be in the same line of work as Richard Gere in Pretty Woman) and it’s interesting the film is commenting on how unfulfilling that line of work can be.

But it’s also notable that by then, and pre-GFC, while finance guys weren’t the most beloved ilk, they weren’t as hated as they will come to be.

What is the 2027 version of Thomas Crown? Can you still get the audience to feel attached to a bored billionaire?

It’s a very different time now than in 1999 when during that era, Bill Gates and Carlos Slim traded the title of richest man in the world for about a decade, their wealth also remaining relatively steady compared to the enormous growth of this epoch’s tech titans.

Will Jordan’s Thomas Crown be some AI tech bro, tired of engineers and venture capitalists? If he tries to woo Arjona’s character with an island retreat or other forms of conspicuous consumption, are we going to find that hot or gross?

It only works if we’re seduced as well.

The 1968 and 1999 versions of The Thomas Crown Affair are on Prime Video