When Warner Bros. paired a former Secret Service agent with a pop superstar at the end of 1992, it walked away with $411 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, plus the best-selling movie soundtrack ever pressed. That kind of success doesn’t go away, and three decades on, it was still causing headaches for a romance novel with no connection to it.
Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard arrived from St. Martin’s Press in July 2022 and spent much of its shelf life sold as The Bodyguard: The Novel, purely to stop readers from turning up expecting Whitney Houston. The book flips the setup rather than redoing it, with a female executive protection agent assigned to a male action star, and when Netflix picked it up, the title problem came along for the ride (the streamer also carries the Richard Madden thriller series of the same name, which can’t have helped).
Center announced the fix on Instagram in January, after crowdsourcing suggestions from readers, and the adaptation became Guarding Stars. Filming wrapped in Calgary back in March, though, and nothing had been attached to it since.
Netflix has now confirmed a date. Guarding Stars lands on the platform Nov. 18, according to Deadline, dropping it into the streamer’s cozy-season window alongside the country-leaning book adaptations that have performed well there. Leighton Meester and Jared Padalecki lead, with Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum (Aquamarine, Purple Hearts) directing from a script by Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith.
Meester plays Hannah Brooks, newly single and grieving her mother, who is handed the job of protecting action star Jack Stapleton (Padalecki) from a stalker over the holidays. He takes her home to the family ranch and asks her to pose as his girlfriend so nobody asks questions, which works roughly as well as that ever does. Andie MacDowell, country singer Walker Hayes, Noah LaLonde, Toby Sandeman, and CM Punk fill out the cast.
The date marks the end of a long big-screen absence for Padalecki, whose last live-action feature was the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. Supernatural and Walker kept him on television in between, and he produces here with Genevieve Padalecki under their Living in the Asterisk banner, with Gina Matthews and Grant Scharbo. For Center, it’s a third adaptation after The Lost Husband in 2020 and Netflix’s own Happiness for Beginners in 2023, which suggests Netflix is pretty comfortable with her. Rosenbaum told Deadline that BookTok enthusiasm was “a major factor in my decision to come on board.”
The 1992 original, meanwhile, is still waiting on its actual remake. Warner Bros. has had a version circling since 2011, ran through a Matthew Lopez draft along the way, and named Sam Wrench as director in April 2025, working from a script by Juror #2 writer Jonathan Abrams, but there’s still no cast. Netflix will have released a film with a female bodyguard, a male movie star, and a Montana ranch long before anyone learns who’s standing in for Costner, which is as good an argument as any for changing your title early and getting on with it.
