OldBoy

[BEGIN RANT]

is there really such a dearth of originality in Hollywood that they have to remake, reboot, resurface, repurpose, etc... every movie that once was iconic and grand? do you think it takes away from those beloved classics (whether true classic or just perceived)?

I know this has been going on for some time and is not simply a new phenomenon, but when we get reboots of superhero movies mere a few years after the originals or prequels with a glossy, but dull new surface, is it all just too much?

it is just so many and so much so soon, that it just seems to overshadow the true original (new) classics of the Hollywood mainstream and independent stream.

of course, I don’t hate the Hollywood “machine”, I am a sucker for the glitzy new toy that comes out to my local Cineplex, but damn if these re”tool” announcements and releases aren’t annoying and all consuming.

why must they churn out cheapie drivel in order to make a buck? of course, I just answered my own question, but I for one am sick of the undying, unyielding, good to great movies that get refinished, but this time with a new coat of cheap, f-in paint!

[/END RANT]

Your rant?

Groucho

Agree 100%. The worst example of this was the Hollywoodizing of the Dutch television series "Forbrydelsen" on AMC as "The Killing".

Numanoid

I hate it almost as much as I hate the remakes, reboots, and retreads of this thread topic.

dugan

Only if the remake is better.

Hokeyboy

I've asked this before, but have any of these "80s remakes" really carved out any kind of real success? I don't mean if they were "profitable" or "certified Fresh", but have they transcended their original source material and achieved a real identity of their own as something unique and worthwhile?

Fame, Footloose, Total Recall, Red Dawn, Clash of the Titans, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Karate Kid, The Thing (technically not a remake, except it was), Fright Night, Karate Kid, Arthur...

We also got Robocop, Evil Dead, Poltergeist, The Fly, Videodrome, either coming out soon or in pre-production...

OK, these are quick cash-grab attempts on recognizable properties, but nothing has REALLY broken out. Maybe that Karate Kid thing. Few of these barely limp it to $50 million (if at all) and many if not most are critically loathed.

Draven

Did everyone know The Wizard of Oz is a remake?

It's been around since the beginnings of the film industry. You should be used to it by now.

Ash Ketchum

So much of what's being made by the two other once-great film industries I follow--Japan and Hong Kong--is the remaking/rebooting/rehashing of much earlier productions. I've had it with those also. I'd rather watch old stuff I've never seen before from those countries rather than "new" stuff I have seen umpteen times before (e.g. the SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO live-action movie in Japan, and assorted rehashes of Bruce Lee's FIST OF FURY in HK).

Rival11

I have to be honest....the remakes didn't bother me at all for a long time...I even looked forward to most of them.

But it's getting a bit too old now.......Yeah I know remakes have been going since the beginning of the time (so to speak) but really, has it ever been as abundant as it is nowadays?

I love continuations of franchises as I like seeing what they came come up with, hell I even like perquels to a certain extent.

It doesn't bother me or anything but I must admit that I do roll my eyes a little every time I hear news of yet another remake (here's looking at you Escape from NY).

DJariya

Whatever happened to the Enter the Dragon remake that was being written and directed by Kurt Sutter? Yes, I'm not joking about that. I think there was a thread floating around.

It is what it is. You take an older successful property and update it for the 21st century for a quick cash grab.

I do think there are some movies that are really dated and need an update.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099426/

I'm surprised no Hollywood studio has attempted to update John Woo's Bullet in the Head from 1990.

Jay G.

For some of the superhero movies, specificall Marvel ones licensed out to studios other than Disney (Fox with Xmen and Fantastic Four, Sony with Spiderman), the studios have to keep making and releasing the films, or they lose the license (which would revert back to Marvel, which since it's now part of Disney, wouldn't license them back out again).

Sony probably would've been up for a Spiderman 4, but since Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire were done with the series, they rebooted it instead.

Whiskey Warfield

Wasn't Nick Cage supposed to have redone the Thin Man series, with himself as Nick Charles?

whoopdido

I'm more annoyed by all the comic movies. How many do we need? I bitched about this once before but every origin story is essentially the same. Dude doesn't have powers, dude gets powers, dude saves the day.

That's why I actually really like Hancock. Instead of the entire world, including the dude himself, suddenly discovering that superheroes and superpowers exist during the movie, everybody already knew about him and also knew how much of an asshole he was. It basically skipped the origin story and just started up with a backstory already in place, which I thought was cool.

JumpCutz

That was actually Johnny Depp.

hanshotfirst1138

The audience for these big blockbusters was once teenage boys to whom they could provide the requistie escapism. Nowadays, they have no need for it when they can stimulate their dopamine receptor directly with X-Box 360s, so Hollywood has desperately tried to get asses back into seats by banking on nostalgia. Plus, and I hate saying this because it makes me feel like a snobby asshole, but I think by and large audiences don't want anything even slightly new. Now matter how worn and old, people keep coming back to the love-conquers-all stuff and that's why Hollywood keeps making it. If a film challenges the audience in any way, even if it ends happily, I think studios tend to get skittish. I actually saw an interview with John Landis where he was asked about the upcoming An American Werewolf in London remake. He smirked as said that if it went well, he'd look like he'd had a great initial idea that they'd taken it from, and if it ended badly, his film would look that much better. Do I think he should've had more integrity about the quality of his own art? Maybe, but I'm being an armchair moralist; I might do the same if I was offered millions, who knows?

My dad thought that the US version was phenomenal. I wish you could get the Danish version in the US, I'd Netflix, but I can't imagine AMC wants that dirty laundry out there .

Solid Snake

My feelings on a remake is if a film could be improved upon. The Fly, John Carpenter's The Thing, and some others hold the honor of being the better.

While things like Raimi's Evil Dead, a film I consider to be perfect, being remade in the way that it seems to be I think has a good reason to be remade. Simply due to the tone and opportunity they are allowed. Whether it sucks or rocks, Evil Dead is too big to be hurt by it. I'm actually pretty excited for it just due to the production it has and also how modern American Horror just sucks.

Uhhhh...no it's not. The Wizard of Oz, the big one w/ Garland, isn't a remake. It's merely another adaptation of the book. Maybe I don't remember or know but I don't think they ever used a previous film version as it's source.

You guys really really have to understand wtf a remake is. A remake, by definition in the use of the film medium, is a film that uses a previous film as it's source text for production.

True Grit, Casino Royale and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo aren't remakes. They're just films based on the books, which had already been adapted into films before.

The new Evil Dead, The Thing (Carpenter's), Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Magnificent Seven, Fistful of Dollars, Dawn of the Dead are actual remakes.

Jay G.

There really isn't a consensus on what the proper definition of a remake is, so not everyone agrees with your definition.

However, by your definition, The Thing (Carpenter's), Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments are not remakes. The Thing is based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr. Ben Hur is based on a novel by Lew Wallace. And The Ten Commandments is adapted from The Bible.

Fistful of Dollars is interesting, as it's obstensibly an unofficial remake of Yojimbo, yet Serge Leone claims Yojimbo was an unofficial adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, while all three were likely influenced by Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fistful...ars#Production

Solid Snake

The films I mentioned, that you pointed out, did use the previous film as a basis.

While something like True Grit and Casino Royale did not.

Jay G.

Now you're trying to interpret director's intent. Which is asking for trouble.

For example, from the wikipedia article on The Thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)

OldBoy

I'm not saying all of them are bad. Some are mindless fun and some the aforementioned are quite good to great, but there comes a point when the well just has to run dry, no? probably not.

Tarantino

at Snake.

How can you sit there with a straight face and tell me Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a nearly shot for shot remake, is not a remake, just because they were based on a book?

Anyway, I'm not bothered by remakes, I just don't see many of them.

whoopdido

You're taking this whole thing too seriously and thinking WAY too much about it. Different adaptations of books? Get real man. A new movie just like an old movie is a remake plain and simple.

So was the newest Spider-Man not a remake and just a different adaptation of the comic book?

Ash Ketchum

What bothers me about all the comic book movies is that when I was young and reading Marvel comics religiously, I really wanted to see big-budget movies based on these things. Instead we got crappy Saturday morning cartoons and low-budget prime-time TV series shot in L.A. when they were supposed to be set in New York.

By the time I hit my middle 30s, I discovered anime which satisfied whatever yearnings I ever had for film versions of Marvel, because they offered animated worlds that came as close as anything I've ever seen to capturing the spirit of Marvel Comics artwork in animation. (E.g., compare GOLGO 13 to Jim Steranko's Nick Fury.) By the 21st Century, when the Spiderman films started coming out, and the X-men films, and the Iron Man films and the Hulk films, etc., I no longer cared about these friggin' superheroes. I'd entered my second (third? fourth?) childhood and was more interested in Power Rangers and the Pokemon movies.

So there!

Double_Oh_7

Yes. You're confusing reboots and remakes.

BambooLounge

I don't care as much as I used to about reboots, remakes, retreads, etc. I used to view it as the death of Hollywood and all that jazz, but really, these things have been around forever and they are easy enough to ignore.

My personal movie collection and Netflix streaming has enough titles in it to keep me discovering great cinema of yesteryear until I die, which allows me to pick and choose what I decide to see in theaters. Even still, I never manage to get to the theater to see every single release I want to see when it comes out and will invariably wait for things to hit Blu-ray.

So, while yes, many of these reboots and remakes are of the franchise/tentpole variety, so they make the most marketing noise, there tends to be enough good films available to watch in theaters or at home at any given point.

While it is annoying to go through rehashed origin stories (they are all the same), comic book franchise reboots don't bother me at all. I've said this elsewhere I'm sure, but I view the comic book movie genre as essentially replacing comic books themselves for young people today. When I was a kid and into comics (Marvel mostly), there were a ton of Spiderman titles all going on at the same time (Astonishing, Amazing, Spiderman, Spectacular, etc). So, the idea of there being different comic book movies out there telling similar stories with different tones, actors, directors, does not bother me all that much. Kids who like Spiderman will probably want all the Spidey they can get, just like I would get my Wolverine fix in any comic book I could get my hands on as a kid.

Does it irk me when I see a commercial or announcement for a remake of Straw Dogs? Yeah. I can't help it I guess. But, does it ruin my day, tarnish the original film, or cause me to fear that there will be nothing worth viewing at some point in my life? Absolutely not.

hanshotfirst1138

May the power protect you.

It's also entirely possible that the author's intentions regarding any work of art can be difficult to reconcile with the actual work itself. Some might argue there are huge differences between what a movie is about and what the filmmakers say it might be about in some cases.

Yes, it was, though mostly what it was was a placeholder so that Sony could hold on to the rights where there was an artistically viable reason for another film or not.

To be fair, apparently Christopher Frayling pointed out that apparently, there are some beats in the Coen's True Grit that they lifted out from the Hathaway film. Take, for example, Kenneth Brannagh's Frankenstein, which apparently has lots of homages to the original films but is ostensibly lifted from the source novel. I do think that generally, an adaptation of another work isn't strictly a remake, but I do think there are some things that blur the lines.

But I do get the sentiment. Part of the reason that I hate the A Nightmare On Elm Street remake as much as I do is this exact reason. It's one thing just making a bad film. But that remake isn't just a bad film, it's a movie with a rotten heart. It exists solely to cash in on a presold name knowing that dumbasses such a I would pay to see it because of it. It's a film with no artistry, no wit, no imagination, no creativity, it brings nothing new, it exists solely as a banking system to cash in the face of Freddy Krueger and the audience of idiots like me who'll pay. It's a desecration of something beautiful.