Oh, fuck no.

[yendi]

They're remaking Straw Dogs.

Here's the deal, Hollywood: Remakes themselves aren't a bad idea. But remakes of good films are. Remake films that had potential, but ended up sucking. Give us a new take on Waterworld, Paycheck, Cabin Fever, or They Only Kill Their Masters. Movies that all sound great on paper, and which clearly have tons of potential, but which just fail miserably in the final analysis. That will allow you to maintain your current state of abject unoriginality without pissing all over cinematic treasures.

Comments

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

You know what would be good to remake? The Black Hole. Fascinating idea; crappy execution. This, on the other hand, will suck.

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

I've always held that Paycheck would've been better if they'd swapped the casting of Ben Affleck and Paul Giamatti.

Well, and if the script had been anything worth a damn too. But the switched casting would have been a start.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

I have an odd desire to see if I could remake Batman and Robin.

I'd never use Poison Ivy without Harley Quinn, though, and assuming the Burton films have continuity that's impossible.

I'd probably just film "Heart of Ice" with elements of "Subzero" to burn up some budget and provide the special-effects extravaganza at the end.

And Freeze gets to make one cold pun. That's IT. Just before he dies. With Batman's response being "You're not funny."

[fings.livejournal.com]

My hypothesis is the proper movies for remaking are ones that have an IMDB rating between approximately 5.0-6.5. These represent movies that had good elements, but were imperfectly made. For instance, the four movies you mention have ratings of 5.4, 6.1, 5.2, and 6.0 respectively.

Remaking anything rated higher than 6.5 is a bad idea. The best the remake of a high rated movie can hope for is to be as good as the original, and even then, what's the point?

More likely, the remake will be worse than the original, plus it will piss off fans. This example, Straw Dogs, rates a 7.6, and so should not be remade.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I think that it's possible to remake good movies if and only if you have a really interesting and distinctive take on it.

The 1995 Harrison Ford/Julia Ormond remake of the 1954 Humphrey Bogart/Audrey Hepburn movie Sabrina was interesting in that the story is fundamentally class-based, and attempting to put it into the 90s, in a time when people want to believe we're a classless society did a bunch of weird things.

It wasn't as good a movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's interesting sociologically -- in attempting to deny the reality of class in the United States, the movie ends up putting Sabrina and Linus into the same social class, and ignoring all the characters who are ACTUALLY of a different social class -- which cuts the feet out from under the entire premise of the movie.

That said, it's still a reasonable film to re-make, even if they did it poorly, because the actual question of "in what ways would this situation play out differently in 1995 than in 1954" is an interesting question.

They just totally missed any interesting answers.

[lordrexfear.livejournal.com]

Did you say Cabin Fever should be remade?

It's not bad enough to you they're making a sequel and the lead is Rider Strong?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0961722/

Or the Gerard Butler "Escape from LA"?

They should just remake all of Burt Reynold's films, if they insist on remakes. That's a treasure trove of stuff.
Navajo Joe, Fuzz, Skullduggery, Shamus, White Lightning/Gator, Hustle.

[phantom_wolfboy]

I'd never use Poison Ivy without Harley Quinn, though, and assuming the Burton films have continuity that's impossible.

It's difficult, but not impossible. She could still be a joker groupie; she just wouldn't have known him personally.

Alternately, you could retcon that meeting in with a flashback. We can't, after all, possibly know everything that the Joker was up to during the first movie.