Remakes get a lot of flack these days. I can sympathize.
I myself have rolled eyes at the mere mention of a modern take on my personal sacred cows, Halloween or Robocop. If anyone (and I mean anyone) even remotely contemplates a “reboot” of Dr. Strangelove I will draw blood.
Recently, there has been a whole host of such reboots, among them transgendered busters of spectral entities, lovable protagonists from almost every laugh-a-minute slasher flick of the 1980s, and memory-deficient super-spies travelling from one planet to the next. Some do well, some don’t. The $100 million remake of Ben Hur flopped last weekend.
You’d think there would be no stone unturned, no film untouched by now, with the possible exception of any offering from the zombie genre – oh wait. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead anyone? Heck, there have been not one but two remakes of Night of the Living Dead and one of Day of the Dead. So never mind.
I understand why fans of a particular film get into a snit over this. The proverbial “twisting of knickers” does appear at the outset to be an appropriate response.
But what’s the big deal? Your beloved original still exists. It will always be there. It’s not like MGM is going to burn all previous media permutations of the Magnificent Seven once Antoine Fuqua’s version comes out this fall. And dare we mention that it’s been remade before as a Roger Corman-produced space opera? Or the fact that it was itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s awesome Seven Samurai?
Speaking of Fuqua, it was recently announced that he would be helming yet another remake of Scarface. And when I type “another,” there is a whole generation of gangsta rappers and 1980s movie nerds who don’t seem to be aware that Brian De Palma’s masterpiece was a remake itself. Acolytes of Paul Muni must have turned in their graves when they heard back in the early 80s that an Italian immigrant based on Al Capone was going to be turned into a Cuban refugee played by Al Pacino.
So what is there to complain about? While the prospect of attempting to make a fast buck from a previously established, popular brand can be annoying, no one complained when BMW capitalized on their purchase of BMC by “remaking” and rolling out the new Mini Cooper.
This stuff happens all the time in many different industries and markets. Hollywood and its global counterparts are no different.
The safest route to financial success often rests in repackaging the familiar. If it worked before, it will most likely work again.
A lot of today’s complaints about the remake craze ignore the industry’s history of frequently rebooting and repackaging titles from their respective libraries. The Maltese Falcon was made three times within the short span of a single decade. John Huston’s classic was only the last of that batch. The recent, female-led Ghostbusters appears 32 years after the original’s release.
Even Alfred Hitchcock remade his own The Man Who Knew Too Much even though 22 years passed between the first and latest incarnations.
There was a time when people actually got pretty excited when a remake was announced. Philip Kaufman’s 1977 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was greeted with great anticipation and excellent reviews, and now stands as a worthy successor to Don Siegel’s classic. And while John Carpenter’s The Thing did not fare as well in 1981, it is now regarded as one of the best remakes ever made.
There is, however, a tricky argument to navigate when one brings up a Thing or a Maltese Falcon. It is whether a movie is a remake or just another adaption of a previously filmed story. Most critics consider Carpenter’s The Thing a remake of the 1950s Howard Hawks-produced sci-fi thriller The Thing From Another World. Yet the Carpenter variation is actually a more faithful adaption of the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella Who Goes There? than it is of the movie many people think it’s based on.
Or how about Dracula? Only a handful of the movies made about the bloodthirsty count can be directly linked to Bram Stoker’s novel. Many of them are remakes of the 1931 Universal classic movie starring Bela Lugosi or film versions of a successful Broadway play. Both Lugosi and Frank Langella played the eponymous vampire in productions of that play before they revisited the character in what would become their breakthrough role.
Clearly rehashing titles once or twice is nothing new. It’s just that these days our reactions are different. That may be due to our access to the 24/7 news feed that is the internet.
For example, people immediately reacted to the sex change of the main characters in this year’s Ghostbusters. To them, not only was Hollywood cashing in on a beloved brand but it was indulging in a gimmick as well.
Yet if that immediate feedback existed back in the 1940s, would adoring film audiences respond to the great screwball comedy His Girl Friday in the same way? Because the female lead was a male character in the previously released The Front Page? I could go on.
Here’s another shocker. Not all remakes are bad. In fact, some are just as good as the originals. And we need more good remakes.
Here are 10 great films that are just as good as the first: Kaufman’s Body Snatchers, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (remade from Wages of Fear), the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, George Cukor’s A Star is Born, Carpenter’s The Thing, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (from La Jette), Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Recently we’ve heard about a “reboot” of Ocean’s Eleven titled Ocean’s Eight (featuring yet another switched gender take on what was originally an all-male ensemble) which has been cast and will be in production soon.
Already people are complaining about this. If you liked the first one so much, I’ve got a bridge to sell you and it’s also called Ocean’s Eleven. That one was made in 1960. You can have it as long as Frank, Dino and the rest of the Rat Pack can keep their casino winnings.
George and Brad couldn’t walk in their shoes anyway.
“It’s a remake right? So Ben-Hur, done that?” – @JSi5 pic.twitter.com/0kDktlEXku
— KiddNation (@KiddNation) August 22, 2016
