Your thoughts on remakes, in general

[Rob_Royale]

In the "bad" movies thread @SimonDoom brought up the Roadhouse remake.

I'd like to talk about the genre as a whole. Because we have The Crow and the Highlander in the works and they will be causing a stir. I think we all know the fan bases that come with those titles. They both spawned awful sequels after the first films that are now quite iconic. I will attempt to leave my own personal opinions out of this post as I'd rather hear your views on the subject than your views on my views, which is what usually happens here.

I've talked about this quite a bit at work, as all of us on my team are big movie fans, in general. Some see remakes as a way to bring classic stories to the big screen again, like the Coen brothers attempted with True Grit. Others see it as a shameless money grab like Disney's live action remakes of it's animated titles.

Others question the very idea of them. Are there no new screenplays being written? No new ideas?

Why make them if your not bringing something different or better to the story. The new Crow for instance, seems a big departure from Brandon Lee's film. Some so-so films could be improved upon just by adding better effects and actors like Karl Urban's film Dredd and the recent A Star is Born and 3:10 to Yuma.

We talk often at work about studios trying to replace legendary actors like they did with True Grit. I've heard rumors of a remake of the African Queen a few years back. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman were reportedly attached. Nothing ever came of it, but how do you feel about trying to replace Bogey and Hepburn with ... hell, anyone really?

There was a time when remakes seemed to be dying off, but streaming movies have changed that. People are more willing to take a chance on yet another Magnificent Seven remake when they don't have to pay for tickets and overpriced popcorn.

Now I said, that I would attempt to leave my own personal opinions out of this post. I think you'll agree that I wasn't quite able to but I implore you not to focus on that. Your thoughts please, on the subject.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Generally speaking (but being a film buff from the age of twelve, so I've seen a few movies over many decades), remakes are lazy movie making, unless they turn out better than the original. But that's rare. Very rare.

It's like people coming along saying, I can update/rewrite/improve your story, let me do it, because it's such a great idea. It was, which is why the movie/story was made/written in the first place. "Now show me your own good idea."

 

[AwkwardMD]

Sorceror, the greatest movie ever made, is a remake, ergo remakes are potentially-but-not-always good

 

[Bamagan]

I find them a mixed bag, just like covers of older songs by newer musicians. Sometimes they're good, or even an improvement (from a certain point of view, anyway). Sometimes they're merely neutral because they're so different it becomes apples and oranges. And sometimes they're a disaster. Sometimes they're made as an homage by people who love and respect the original, and sometimes they're made by executive fiat because of the belief that there's an established market for the product (and I think those tend to be the ones that become disasters).

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Sorceror, the greatest movie ever made, is a remake, ergo remakes are potentially-but-not-always good

Ahem
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27487473/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_wages%20of%20fear

 

[AlinaX]

Sometimes remakes just don't make sense, like The Italian Job, just because the original is too iconic. Was there really a new audience to be reached with that one?

Sometimes, like with Dune, each adaptation can only capture a fragment of the bigger story, thus Lynch's version is fantastic for so many reasons but the TV series is far more faithful to the source material. The new movies are technical masterpieces, but in seeking to modernise themes they rather miss the point.

I watched a remake of Firestarter recently that failed entirely to add anything of merit over the Drew Barrymore version; I actually have a fondness for the Firestarter sequel (Rekindled) with Malcolm McDowell and Marguerite Moreau, despite its inconsistencies with the original.

Was Red Dragon better than Manhunter? I'm a little too biased against the non-Demme Hannibal films to answer.

I'm sure I've seen remakes that I enjoyed more. War of the Worlds is always an interesting one, again like Dune based on a novel, and maybe that's an important factor in this discussion.

It's a bit like song covers. I can think of at least three where I prefer the covers to the original...

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Few of the remakes are an improvement over the originals. The way I see it, remakes are done when you want to monetize the fame of some good old movie. The story is already there, so you don't need to trouble yourself with obtaining a good script. Just have some hack do some small changes and update the original for contemporary audiences and voila. With rare exceptions, the new version will be much worse than the original.

 

[SimonDoom]

I can't come up with any generalizations on the issue. There are examples like True Grit where the remake closely followed the plot and dialogue of the original, but in a new, artistic way, that IMO worked. There are examples like Scarface where the remake borrows some concepts of the original but it basically a completely new movie, that also worked.

A Star is Born is a good example of a timeless story that can work as a remake because each remake reinterprets it for a new generation.

There are remakes I don't understand, like the remake of Psycho, which duplicates the original almost frame by frame. Why bother?

The Departed and The Ring were both worthwhile English-language remakes of Asian films. That makes sense.

On the other hand, the 21st century version of The Magnificent 7 was nowhere near as good as the original.

The Thing (1982) was an example of a great remake because it reverted to the original short story, unlike the 1950s film which had very little to do with the original story. It had a valid artistic purpose.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Like anything else, it depends.
Brewster's Millions is a hilarious movie and well worth watching.
It's also the 7th version of that film all based on a novel from 1902.

I actually can't stand it when the remake is a shot for shot, "look, we have better effects" remake, but telling the story in a different way can be powerful.
Both True Grit movies are good, the remake is closer to the source material.


Steven Speilberg's film "Always" is a remake of the 1943 film "A Guy Named Joe".
There's a brilliant bit where Richard Dreyfuss's character talks about how their base (water bombers fighting a forest fire in 1989) is just like an airbase in England during WW2, which was the setting of the original.
Both are brilliant, timeless movies.

 

[Voboy]

I have no problem with remakes, provided they bring something new to the table, except that so many of them are...

a. unnecessary, because the original was good enough to leave little meat on the bone to be improved;
b. poorly made, relative to the original. These are a money grab. They were easier to make in the '90s than they are nowadays, though.

When they're good, though, they're really good. A big reason to respect remakes is that modern cinema can do better with certain techniques and/or subjects than it was possible to do before.

 

[Yarglenurp]

I think you forget the "industry" part of "entertainment industry." The decision-makers who greenlight projects are all in it for the dollars. Those guys would film a movie of a monkey crapping bloody diarrhea on a donkey's severed head for ten hours straight if that's what would get them the biggest payday. Remakes, sequels, franchise extensions... they're cheap. Less time to establish the story-making process, built-in audience, lower risk. They don't do it to win your admiration, and your derision doesn't cost them any money. These are the geniuses that would quash and permanently destroy a never-released, fully-completed movie for the tax write-off.

You want actual art inspired by human creativity and writing that comes from the heart? I actually think that places like Literotica is where you find it... there's no money to be made here. Here, writers are free to do what they want. Sure, it's erotica, but it's honest. People are writing what they find arousing and sexy instead of writing what they think will get them the most dollars. In its own way, the stuff you read here is far more noble than any of the stuff you'd get from a big-budget Hollywood movie.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I have no problem with remakes, provided they bring something new to the table, except that so many of them are...

a. unnecessary, because the original was good enough to leave little meat on the bone to be improved;
b. poorly made, relative to the original. These are a money grab. They were easier to make in the '90s than they are nowadays, though.

When they're good, though, they're really good. A big reason to respect remakes is that modern cinema can do better with certain techniques and/or subjects than it was possible to do before.

I'd add a third category, remakes of movies that weren't that great to begin with and they become a remake in name only.

Roadhouse is a good example of this.
The original is NOT a great movie.
It's a good dumb movie. 2 hours of entertainment but that's it. It isn't some timeless story, it wasn't cinematic art.
Then you "remake" it and basically change EVERYTHING. All you did was steal a title.

 

[alohadave]

Brewster's Millions is a hilarious movie and well worth watching.
It's also the 7th version of that film all based on a novel from 1902.

I was shocked to see how many times it had been remade when I looked a while back. It's also interesting to see how inflation has affected the inheritance over time. Now it'd probably be 100M/1B.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I was shocked to see how many times it had been remade when I looked a while back. It's also interesting to see how inflation has affected the inheritance over time. Now it'd probably be 100M/1B.

Yeah, I've wondered if they'd have to go 300m/3B.

Just a fun premise and "updating" it makes sense.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Another vote for "remakes can be good if they do something new and interesting, not so much if they're just driven by a lack of new ideas".

 

[Areala-chan]

Remakes are definitely a "handle with care" area for the vast majority of those that are attempted. If there's a genuine and compelling reason why a film should be remade, beyond just "we can do a cash grab with this", then I'm honestly all for them. But I think the trick to remaking a film (or anything, really) is finding a property that would benefit from a remake for the right reason: either it was a movie that didn't get the chance to fully shine the first time it came out for one reason or another, or it has the sort of storyline which is essentially timeless and can easily attract a new audience by being updated to more modern sensibilities, like the aforementioned "Brewster's Millions" and "A Star Is Born".

John Carpenter's "The Thing" worked because it went back to the source material of the short story and extrapolated forward from there. It's almost an entirely different movie from "The Thing From Another World", both of them are solid examples of cinema, and Carpenter clearly cared about creating compelling characters to populate his new (old) narrative. "The Thing From Another World" was solid cinema, but sci-fi horror had come a long way in thirty years, the original was showing its age, and the time was right to re-introduce it to the world. Same can be said for the remake of "The Blob". Neither is a shot-for-shot remake, and both worked to modernize the story and update the special effects while still being respectful that the original existed.

The remake of "Robocop", on the other hand, failed precisely because the original was so iconic, and the people behind it failed to understand what made it so iconic in the first place. The remake could have fully leaned into an over-the-top hyper-violent futuristic landscape while confronting the ideas of how technology changes the battlefield for soldiers and non-combatants alike, but instead it eschewed the 17+ rating and gave us a main character we didn't care about, and abused Samuel L. Jackson by putting him into a picture where he couldn't even drop a single f-bomb. Not cool.

I honestly think a remake of "Psycho" could have worked. Just...not by literally re-shooting the original script practically frame-for-frame. John Boorman's success with "Deliverance" gave him carte blanche to shoot anything he wanted, so he made "Zardoz"...I often wonder if the same thing happened with Van Sant, where someone lost a bet with him and the stakes were, "If I win, I get to shoot whatever I want to shoot next," and he chose "Psycho" just because.

I'm interested to see what happens with "The Crow". It's entirely possible to do that story again without crapping all over the film which will forever remain Brandon Lee's legacy by simply being more faithful to O'Barr's original storyline if they're dead-set on giving us Eric Draven 2.0. I'm one of the few people out there who actually liked "City of Angels" more than the original, so take that with a grain of salt, but I love the original film, I love the comics, and I'm curious. Cautiously curious, mind you, but I'm not going to write it off before I've given it a chance. If I hate it, I've already got Proyas's version in my collection.

 

[ronde]

I think it's difficult to make a remake if the original was a good movie with iconic actors. For me, it's difficult to watch an remake of such a movie without comparing the "new" actor to the original. Usually I find the new actor comes up short. It's true that "Road House" wasn't a great movie, but it's hard to imagine any other actor playing the roles played by Patrick Swazey, Ben Gazarra, and Sam Elliott. Each brought a unique "style" to their roles that probably won't be duplicated any time soon. Couple that with the "artistic" re-write of the dialogue and plot, and it's a loser as far as I'm concerned.

The original "True Grit" did deviate from the novel, but after watching the remake which was closer, I still couldn't imagine Rooster Cogburn being played by anybody but John Wayne.

As others have pointed out, the reason for remakes is probably financial rather than a lack of new material. Remakes will attract fans of the originals at least until the reviews come out, and the cost of a remake has to be significantly less than starting from scratch. Just a few re-writes of the original screen play or script, cast a couple lesser known actors, and go.

 

[StillStunned]

I prefer Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings to Ralph Bakshi's. But I like A New Hope more than The Force Awakens.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

When a film gets dated enough that people watch it for historical interest rather than reacting how the contemporary audience would, there's a case for a remake.

The Sean Connery Bond films, for example. As a kid, I saw this sleazy guy talking funny and treating women like objects, and didn't understand Bond was meant to be the sex symbol. So new films brought the Bond experience to a new audience - and the Daniel Craig Casino Royale was excellent.

Similarly the original Ghostbusters was fun but I never liked the characters or related to them at all. I loved the female remake which was hilarious. Ocean's Eleven - a decent modern heist movie.

But yes, most remakes are just movies made to make money because people will watch new movies - though as cinemas change to tempt people through the doors, I suspect we'll get more and more 'see old movie on the big screen' - possibly remastered or a director's cut - and if the industry doesn't have to make as many films, so be it.

 

[alohadave]

The Sean Connery Bond films, for example. As a kid, I saw this sleazy guy talking funny and treating women like objects, and didn't understand Bond was meant to be the sex symbol. So new films brought the Bond experience to a new audience - and the Daniel Craig Casino Royale was excellent.

Ironically, in the books, Bond is not a ladies man. He's a brute with a face that could curdle milk. It's the big screen that created what we think Bond should be.

Also, Austin Powers forced Casino Royale and Daniel Craig to change course to make it harder and more realistic. Mike Meyer's parody showed that they couldn't make Bond movies like they used to.

 

[OffNSFW]

Couple things:

1. I think we should coin the term "re-adaptation" to distinguish between a remake of a movie vs. a book/comic/whatever that has multiple movie adaptations. The Coens' True Grit, for example, may have taken some elements from the earlier movie, but it mainly revisits the book.

2. I think we're getting more lately because we're getting more sequels/spinoffs/general IP exploitation across the board. (I've heard this referred to as "pop cultural fracking.") For a long time, the movie business has been run by people who are in the business of buying and selling companies. They don't understand movies and might not even like them, but movies (really, movie companies) are a tool for consolidating power and influence. They're pieces on the board in the big game of Monopoly. These people are not going to take a risk on art or originality. They don't see the point.

I don't know if it's ever been this bad, but we've been in situations like this before, where movie companies think they've found the big formula that they can repeat forever and never see diminishing returns. They're wrong, of course--it won't last. It never does. Sooner or later, one of two things will happen. Either the whole industry will collapse, or they'll have to take a chance on putting control back in the hands of actual storytellers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't know if it's ever been this bad, but we've been in situations like this before, where movie companies think they've found the big formula that they can repeat forever and never see diminishing returns. They're wrong, of course--it won't last. It never does. Sooner or later, one of two things will happen. Either the whole industry will collapse, or they'll have to take a chance on putting control back in the hands of actual storytellers.

There have been several major shake-outs in the history of cinema. The first really big one was the decline of the big studio system, the Hollywood film factories, in the 1950s, as they tried to compete with television.

The first big fight back was wide screen, at first with three projector systems then 70mm and anamorphic lenses. That resulted in the big epics of the 1960s - David Lean's movies, some of the classic westerns, 2001, etc.

At the same time, European cinema dominated the art movies - the French and Italians mostly.

Then Brit Pop and the swinging sixties - James Bond, The Italian Job, "my name is Michael Caine." And in the US, lower budget independent studios, a new breed of director, culminating in The Godfather era.

Then Star Wars hit, Spielberg and so on, the rise of the multiplex, sequel after sequel, into the remakes and here we are. High technology movies, and movies made with super lightweight digital cameras.

My prediction for the next signing technological shift - virtual reality.

 

[PeytonMirabelle]

Thoughts on remakes are mixed. In general, I find them inferior to the original product. It (too often) feels like a hollow attempt to capture the magic and artistic vision of what came before, but without the elan that made the first one what it was. IMO, the remakes of movies like Total Recall, Magnificent Seven, and Robocop have all been pale imitations--and even those first two strayed from the original source material. Every iteration seems to dilute the end result even more until it's so bland it's tasteless.

A lot of it is tied up with the personalities involved. How would a remake of The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly go without the iconic actors of the three main characters go over? Probably not well. Sometimes, that special combination just can't be recaptured. I understand someone is trying to remake Time Bandits now. Just ... no.

There are some exceptions. I thought the remake of Thomas Crown Affair was better than the original, and that Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo had much better on-screen chemistry than Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. Musically, I know Blinded By the Light was originally a Bruce Springsteen song but I think Mandfred Mann's version was superior. But these are not the norm.

My partner told me about a decade ago that Hollywood was surviving on remakes, animations, adaptations (from other sources), and milking IP legacy. If anything, I think it is ever worse now than then.

 

[OffNSFW]

There have been several major shake-outs in the history of cinema. The first really big one was the decline of the big studio system, the Hollywood film factories, in the 1950s, as they tried to compete with television.

The first big fight back was wide screen, at first with three projector systems then 70mm and anamorphic lenses. That resulted in the big epics of the 1960s - David Lean's movies, some of the classic westerns, 2001, etc.

At the same time, European cinema dominated the art movies - the French and Italians mostly.

Then Brit Pop and the swinging sixties - James Bond, The Italian Job, "my name is Michael Caine." And in the US, lower budget independent studios, a new breed of director, culminating in The Godfather era.

Then Star Wars hit, Spielberg and so on, the rise of the multiplex, sequel after sequel, into the remakes and here we are. High technology movies, and movies made with super lightweight digital cameras.

My prediction for the next signing technological shift - virtual reality.

That's a good summation of the history. I'll add that part of the original studio system going to pieces (and why those pieces are now owned by multinational business conglomerates) is that they were running a vertically integrated business model. If you worked for, say, MGM, you worked solely for MGM, and MGM owned everything in the chain of production from the screenwriter's office to the theaters that the movie would be shown in. It was a flagrant violation of antitrust laws, so the government ordered that the studios be broken up and sold off.

This is another cycle that's come around again: monopolistic practices in the film industry. The worst offender by far is Disney, which regularly buys up other companies in order to dismantle them and either cancel their projects or release them dead on arrival. (For anyone wondering why so few original story ideas are getting made, this is a not-inconsiderable part of it.) Disney also spearheads a majority of these pro forma remakes, spinoffs, etc. and also owns the MCU. They use their influence to book an enormous number of screenings for this endless supply of clone-stamped product, deliberately limiting screenings of movies by other companies. It's not quite the block booking of the old days, but it's similar.

Will we see another big breakup of the movie business? I'm not sure. The political environment today is very different from what it was the last time this happened.

 

[onehitwanda]

The Crow

Oh God, why?