#remakes

The year is 2025. You’re in the movie theater watching Back to the Future IV. Mystical, twinkling music plays as some snot-nosed twerp climactically pulls a dusty tarp off of a Delorean in their grandfather’s old shed. Dramatically lit shots of aviators, orange vest, and Calvin Klein underwear. Down tempo Alan Silvestri theme swells. 40-year old men wearing “Re-elect Mayor Goldie Wilson” shirts whooping during the scene where CGI de-aged Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd step out from the shadows. The sounds of a man in the back of the theater lighting himself on fire. That man is me. Einstein is on a hoverboard.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about movie franchises and how they can be awesome if done right or terrible if done wrong.  Today I want to expand on that theme and talk about some other trends that studios have been using to try to cash in.

The first trend is the reboot, which has a spotty track record.  There are some franchises that have been rebooted with much success and critical acclaim.  The ones that jump immediately to mind are The Dark Knight trilogy reboot of the Batman franchise and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies.  Both of these reboots took well known and well traveled characters and storylines and breathed new life into them which led to commercial and critical success.  However, there are plenty of reboots that fail to achieve the success of their predecessors, both at the box office and from the critics.  

Things get even more insane when franchises get rebooted multiple times.   The Spiderman franchise  had some success with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and then the reboot did pretty well with Andrew Garfield.  Now there are rumors that Spiderman will be rebooted yet again with another new star.  James Bond has been re-cast so many times I’ve lost count and, other than the recent Daniel Craig movies, it hasn’t been a boost to the quality or success of the franchise.  Hollywood will try to squeeze blood out of a stone and every last dollar out of a potentially lucrative franchise.  

The second trend in Hollywood is the remake, which is slightly different than the reboot.  A remake is when a well-known film is copied as the framework for another film but many of the settings, characters, and plot points are changed or updated.  A recent example of this is the remake of the 1982 classic musical movie Annie, which was (quite unnecessarily) remade in 2014 with a new plot, new characters, and several new songs.  

Remakes can sometimes be great.  Ocean’s Eleven is a remake of a “rat pack” film from the 60’s and it’s one that I enjoy considerably.  The Coen Brothers remake of True Grit is another that I thought was well done and added a new dimension to the John Wayne starring original.  But the remakes that match or exceed the original films they are based on are rare, and too often they lose what made the original films so special and loved.

The last trend I’m going to talk about today, and the one that I really can’t stand, is the trend towards increasingly absurd adaptations.  It’s not uncommon for TV shows to be adapted to films, and sometimes with a lot of success.  Batman was a television show first.  21 Jump Street was a television show first.  There would have been no Serenity without the television show Firefly.  And of course the wonderful films of the Monty Python comedy troupe would not have been possible without the television success of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  There have been plenty of duds too, but it’s not the worst thing that Hollywood has done.

But the trend is spiraling downward recently with more and more absurd adaptations.  Disney turned a relatively popular theme park attraction into the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which is sadly still continuing long past it’s expiration date.  Video games have been adapted into several films, none of which were as good or as popular as the games they were based on.  In recent years, sanity has been stretched to the point where board games like Battleship, Monopoly, Candy Land, and the Ouija Board have been adapted into films or are at some point in the development process.  I’m just waiting on movie studios to adapt crappy television commercials or cell phone games into movies.  It’s going to happen.

It’s hard to generalize and say that reboots, remakes, and adaptations are a good thing or a bad thing.  When done with care and craft they can be great to watch and successful financially.  However, as I said in part one of my thoughts on movie franchises, I think that the lack of creativity and over-reliance on proven commodities is one of the reasons that people aren’t going to the movies as often.  Plus there is more competition for our time and money with the increased quality of television and online entertainment.  Angela will have more thoughts on that in the next few days.

One of my friends commented that there seems to be a wealth of huge blockbuster franchises and an explosion of low budget independent films but the “middle class” movies are getting squeezed out.  I don’t have exact figures, but my initial reaction is that he’s on to something.  I know studio executives want to try to minimize risk and maximize profits by creating films that can be cross-marketed and have a wealth of merchandising opportunities, but the primary reason for making a movie should be because it’s a good movie.  When movie studios figure that out, maybe they will see the business grow.

Honestly, after the glut of live-action Disney remakes we’ve had and will have in the near future, I would happily go back to the days of the direct-to-video disney sequels. Sure, most of them were mediocre at best or just made for a quick buck, but at least they were trying to do something different, or even add on to the stories of the films that came before them, rather than just serving up the microwaved leftovers of our nostalgia.

people should avoid believing that remakes will be a success for now. they may be a huge disappointment.