Cape Fear has just dropped on Apple TV+, and it arrives with some serious cinematic baggage in the boot. Before Javier Bardem, Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson stepped into this new psychological thriller, Cape Fear had already terrified audiences twice on the big screen. First came the 1962 original, with Robert Mitchum bringing pure old-school menace as Max Cady. Then came Martin Scorsese’s sweaty, unhinged 1991 remake, with Robert De Niro turning the same role into a full-body nightmare.

Now the story gets the prestige TV treatment, stretching the fear, the paranoia and the family-under-siege tension across a series. It is the latest reminder that Hollywood loves nothing more than taking a great movie idea and asking: what happens if we stay here a little longer?

Sometimes that is a terrible idea. Sometimes it is gold. Here are five other times movies made the jump to TV, in alphabetical order, and proved there was still plenty left in the tank.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Before Buffy became one of the defining TV heroines of the 90s, she was a 1992 movie. The film had the basic idea: a teenage girl discovers she is destined to fight vampires. Fun enough, but not exactly era-defining. Then the TV series arrived in 1997 and everything clicked. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy was sharper, funnier, sadder and far more iconic. What started as a high-school horror-comedy became a full-blown cult classic about growing up, friendship, heartbreak and occasionally staking the undead before prom.

Fargo

The Coen brothers’ 1996 film Fargo felt impossible to follow. It had the accent, the snow, the crime, the woodchipper and Frances McDormand being quietly brilliant. But the TV version did not try to remake it. Instead, it borrowed the tone: polite people doing awful things in very cold places. The result was one of the smartest movie-to-TV translations around. Different characters, different crimes, same feeling that something deeply stupid and deeply dangerous is about to happen.

MASH

MASH began as Robert Altman’s 1970 anti-war film, but the TV version became a monster in its own right. Running for more than a decade, the series mixed comedy, grief and humanity in a way that still feels impressive. It is one of the rare examples where the show didn’t just extend the movie’s world; it arguably overtook it. For many viewers, MASH is the TV series first and the film second.

Westworld

Long before HBO turned Westworld into a sleek maze of robots, memory and existential dread, it was a 1973 Michael Crichton movie about a futuristic theme park going horribly wrong. The TV series took that killer premise and expanded it into something much bigger, stranger and more philosophical. Sometimes too philosophical, perhaps, but when it worked, it really worked. Cowboys, androids, corporate evil and big questions about free will? Not a bad day at the park.

What We Do in the Shadows

The 2014 film What We Do in the Shadows was already a comedy gem: vampires as awkward flatmates, arguing about chores, clubs and general undead admin. The TV series took that mockumentary format and somehow made it even richer. Moving the action to Staten Island gave the show room to build its own gang of hopeless, hilarious bloodsuckers. Proof that even immortals can benefit from a change of scene.

Cape Fear now joins that club. The gamble is simple: can a story built for the big screen survive being stretched out? If history tells us anything, the answer is yes, provided the TV version doesn’t just repeat the movie, but finds a new reason to exist.