Think your company’s bad? Sony Pictures Entertainment has had a woeful 18 months with the notorious company hacks followed by a string of movie flops including “Concussion”, “Aloha” and “Pixels” that led to a market share of just 4% last year.
At Sony’s presentation at the annual film convention CinemaCon, studio head Tom Rothman affirmed: “At Sony, we believe it’s vital to maintain a commitment to originality.”
Sony’s innovation largely seems to consist of sending Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pine into space in “Passengers,” making the self-explanatory animated film “The Emoji Movie” and releasing “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee’s Iraq War literary adaptation “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”
Pine described “Passengers” as “Kubrickian,” while J-Law stumbled in her description of the movie at CinemaCon, leading her to joke to movie exhibitors,”I’m sorry! Tickets are half off!”
Elsewhere Sony’s commitment to originality resulted in the announcement of a reboot of “Charlie’s Angels” to be directed by Elizabeth Banks, another Smurfs movie entitled “The Last Village,” one more “Hotel Transylvania” film and sequels to “The Equalizer,” “Underworld,” “Resident Evil” and “Bad Boys.”
Remakes of “Ghostbusters” and “The Magnificent Seven” have already been filmed and will be released later this year. Sony also revealed the new “Spiderman” reboot featuring Tom Holland as Peter Parker will be called “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”
Do we really need a remake of “Flatliners,” the 1990 Julia Roberts sci-fi film in which a group of students experiment with near-death experiences? “No” would seem to be the answer, but Sony is giving us one anyways.
To quote the title of Sony’s little-seen 1998 thriller starring Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia, these are “Desperate Measures.”
Perhaps most ominously of all, Sony announced a mash-up between “Men in Black” and “21 Jump Street,” the latter being one of its few hits in recent years. They are calling it “MIB 23,” presumably a follow-up to “22 Jump Street,” which was released in 2014.
What is Sony’s end game with the mash-ups?
Why not do “The Da Vinci Kid,” a mash-up of “The Karate Kid” and “The Da Vinci Code” in which a boy’s passion for martial arts leads him to stumble upon earth-shattering Christian conspiracies? Or could we have a fusion of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Tootsie”? In “My Best Friend’s Tootsie Wedding,” a commitment-shy woman discovers her soulmate is an actor who dresses up as a female to get jobs.
Those crossovers are as ‘Kubrickian’ as they come.
.@TomHolland1996 swung by #SonyAtCinemaCon to exclusively reveal the title of #SpiderMan: Homecoming. Thwip! pic.twitter.com/MkBQU42Mcr
— Sony Pictures (@SonyPictures) April 13, 2016
