Pretty Woman endures not because it’s flawless, but because its flaws reveal the ghost of another film still flickering underneath. You can feel 3,000 — the original, brutal story about a sex worker discarded after a week — haunting the edges of the fairy tale Disney insisted on. Croissants turn into pancakes, money jumps in and out of hands, props teleport across scenes; the continuity errors feel less like sloppiness and more like echoes from that scrapped universe, stubbornly refusing to vanish.

Behind the camera, the whole thing nearly collapsed anyway. Al Pacino passed. Richard Gere almost walked. Julia Roberts was young, unproven, and terrified. That famous jewelry-box snap was never meant to be immortal; it was a mischievous trick to catch a real laugh. And that’s the secret: the movie’s fantasy is manufactured, but the warmth between them isn’t. The romance works because, for a few stolen moments, nothing about it feels like a lie.