Petals On The Wind Trailer Teases Romance, Drama And Vengeance

We now have our first look at Lifetime's upcoming Flowers in the Attic followup, Petals on the Wind. The trailer for the TV movie begins by reminding us of the dark events that transpired in the first film, which aired earlier this year, after which we see what's ahead for Cathy and Chris a decade later. For those who've read the V.C. Andrews series, not all of the scenes glimpsed in the second half of the trailer should be familiar.

We've known for a while now that Petals of the Wind would jump forward a decade, rather than picking up immediately after Chris, Cathy and Carrie escape Foxworth Hall. The first movie centered on four siblings whose mother locked them in a secluded bedroom of a huge mansion while she tried to regain a place in her father's will. Petals on the Wind's leap into the future -- the 70s, as The Wrap specifies -- required a bit of recasting in order to age up some of the lead characters Ellen Burstyn and Heather Graham will return to reprise their roles as Olivia (aka The Grandmother) and Corinne (Cathy and Chris's mother), while Cathy and Chris, who were played by Kiernan Shipka and Mason Dye in the previous film, will be played by Rose McIver and Wyatt Nash.

Let's take a look at what the second half of the trailer had to show us. For one thing, Cathy's dancing! We get a glimpse of her with (I'm assuming) Julian...

Cathy dancing

And another shot near the end of Cathy dancing by herself and a man (presumably Chris) waiting in the wings...

Wings

Flowers in the Attic was kind of short on the dancing side of the story, but it looks like Cathy's aspirations as a ballerina will play a role in Petals on the Wind.

And then there's the romance. In the book, Cathy has a few romances and each of them has its own set of issues. The trailer shows some steamy moments...

Romance

shoulder kiss

BOOK SPOILER WARNING! The next page of this article contains spoilers from the book. If you don't want to know anything about how this story ends, don't continue to the next page and tune in for Petals on the Wind when it airs on Lifetime on May 26.

Petals on the Wind BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD!

In the trailer, there's a glimpse of Heather Graham's Corinne looking disheveled and possibly institutionalized, demanding to see her babies...

Corrine

This is not a scene from the book. If anything, it seems like something that might be out of an If There Be Thorns adaptation, which makes me wonder if Lifetime is actually showing us a glimpse of the end of this movie.

We also get this...

Fire

This scene is a bit closer to the book. Technically, we never see Corinne set fire to anything in the book. And she doesn't do it in such close proximity to her mother. I always got the impression that the fire was more a drastic attempt on her part to create a diversion, but that scene looks very intentional, which is a pretty drastic shift from the book.

But we should expect at least some deviations from the story, considering this is a TV movie. And more modifications to the source material may be expected. But we'll have to wait and see how close this movie sticks to the major events that take place as Cathy exacts her revenge on her mother for the years she and her siblings spent locked in an attic.

Kelly West
Assistant Managing Editor

Kelly joined CinemaBlend as a freelance TV news writer in 2006 and went on to serve as the site’s TV Editor before moving over to other roles on the site. At present, she’s an Assistant Managing Editor who spends much of her time brainstorming and editing feature content on the site. She an expert in all things Harry Potter, books from a variety of genres (sci-fi, mystery, horror, YA, drama, romance -- anything with a great story and interesting characters.), watching Big Brother, frequently rewatching The Office, listening to Taylor Swift, and playing The Sims.