Jane Fonda Offers ‘Good Luck’ to Teams Behind Remakes of ‘Barbarella’ and ‘9 to 5’

In accepting the Life Achievement Award at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards on February 23, actress and activist Jane Fonda will be cementing a legacy that surpasses even her own father’s, screen legend Henry Fonda. It’s a well-deserved honor for a talent who has continued to reshape herself over the course of her more than six-decade career, but in regards to the reshaping of some of her most famous work, Fonda remains skeptical.

When asked how she felt about the current remakes underway for “Barbarella” and “9 to 5” during a recent interview with Vogue, Fonda simply responded, “Good luck.” Despite talent like Edgar Wright and Sydney Sweeney working on the former and Jennifer Aniston and Diablo Cody piecing together the latter, Fonda knows the difficulties of striking gold twice.

“Dolly [Parton], Lily [Tomlin], and I have tried to make a remake of ‘9 to 5’ for quite some time, but we were never able to find the right script,” she said. Fonda added later of what a modern interpretation might look like, “The three of us as older women, but with some younger women as well. If there’s gonna be a remake, it has to address the issues facing office workers because it’s even worse today than when we made the original.”

Putting on her political hat, Fonda spoke of how any remake of “9 to 5” nowadays would have to acknowledge the injustices faced by workers today. Though the 1980 comedy revolves around three women who get back at their boss for his mistreatment of them and other women in the office, Fonda isn’t quite sure whether a plot like that could happen in 2025.

“The reality is that today those three women would be hired for a gig by a contracting organization that would place them at a business called Consolidated [from the original film]. They probably would never even meet their boss or know who their boss is,” said Fonda. “They wouldn’t know who to report wage theft or discrimination to. They’d probably have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. To skip over those issues and make a beat-for-beat remake of the original might be funny, but it’s not something I would want to do.”

Since Fonda was a producer on the original “9 to 5,” people have been more inclined to seek out her opinion of reworking the material, but the same can’t be said of her sexy sci-fi flick “Barbarella,” directed by her first husband, Roger Vadim.

“Nobody’s asked me about it! I wish I could do a remake of ‘Barbarella,’ but I wouldn’t play her again. I have a lot of ideas about what that could look like,” Fonda told Vogue, adding later, “If Sydney asks, I’ll let her know. I don’t know her, and I’ve never met her, but I think she’s great. I’m sure she’ll be a fantastic Barbarella.”