My Take On… #79: Why Do We Keep Remaking Good Movies?

Folks, why do we keep remaking good movies?

For as long as I can remember, Hollywood has been going remake crazy. You can see it starting around the late 90s but it wasn’t until we got to the mid 2000s when it got completely out of control.

Instead of doing what Hollywood should be doing, the major studios have been going back and decided to remake old movies out the wazoo and honestly, when it first started, it wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t until we got to the 2010s when they decided to remake every single movie that has existed for no real reason at all except to make a payday.

So why do they keep doing it? Why the hell are we forced to remake classic movies just for the same of making money?

There’s really no reason to keep remaking good classic movies because half of the time they do this, the remake is usually horrible.

Now look, I don’t even mind if you remake good movies but you don’t need to remake every single good one and worst of all, you don’t have to keep remaking movies from the ’80s just to make a profit. Even back in the ’80s, they were remaking films but they weren’t waiting 25 years after the original film to remake them, they were waiting at least 40 years to remake a movie like with Against All Odds & Steven Spielberg’s Always. So if they can just wait until, at the earliest, 40 years to remake something, I’d be fine with that but seriously, they’ve been talking about remaking The Crow, a movie that came out in 1994…20 years ago. And they were talking about this remake since 2009, they weren’t even going to wait 15 years after the movie came out to remake it. I mean, come on.

The worst period when the studios went remake crazy in the early 00s.

Sometime between 2003 and 2006, somebody at Paramount decided to remake almost every single one of their titles for no real reason. For every bad remake they had including Alfie, The Stepford Wives, Yours, Mine, & Ours, War Of The Worlds, and The Honeymooners, you actually had some good remakes in there too including The Longest Yard, Bad News Bears, The Italian Job, Last Holiday, & The Manchurian Candidate but you could tell that there was a period during that time where Paramount decided to just go remake crazy just to make money but even though there were some good films in there, a lot of these remakes didn’t make a lot of money with the only box office successes being The Longest Yard, The Italian Job, & War Of The Worlds.

Nowadays, the worst offenders is Sony, who uses both their regular studio, Columbia Pictures, and their sister studio, Screen Gems, to just remake movies for no reason at all except to cash in. Sony isn’t as bad but they just keep remaking things that didn’t need to be remade like The Karate Kid, which was actually a good movie but they really didn’t need to remake it, but remaking Total Recall & Robocop, two classic cult R rated action pictures, just to make them PG-13 is one of the dumbest moves by any studio I have ever seen. If you’re not even going to remake the movie to suit the audience of the original film, then you’re obviously doing it wrong.

Screen Gems, however, is worse when it comes to remakes remaking stuff like The Stepfather, Straw Dogs, and Carrie, But they remake stuff without even acknowledging them as remakes. I mean, The Roommate is pretty much a remake of Single White Female except it’s in college, The Vow is pretty much a remake of The Notebook, and The Mortal Instruments is pretty much a remake of…well, every fantasy franchise under the sun.

If you’re going to remake something, remake bad movies. Remake movies from the 70s and 80s and that had potential and you know that they had potential but just didn’t make it work. 1941 had a great concept behind it but a botched script to work with, I wouldn’t mind seeing them trying to remake that. Or look at 1981’s Neighbors, the last film John Belushi starred in before he died, it should’ve worked because it paired Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi, who were coming off of The Blues Brothers, and was directed by John G. Avildsen, who was coming off Rocky at the time. But the movie is completely forgotten because it’s a pretty bad movie. That could make for a good remake but then again, if you watch the trailers for the upcoming Seth Rogen/Zac Efron comedy Neighbors, I think that might be a loose remake but either way, it does look really funny:

There are so many bad movies from the 70s and 80s that could benefit from being remade but nope, Hollywood just wants to go and remake the classic films like Robocop, Total Recall, and even The Naked Gun.

And that last one, The Naked Gun, is the reason why I decided to write this up. The fact that they are remaking one of my all-time favorite movies makes me pissed. Granted, they have Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant writing it and they did create Reno 911, one of my favorite shows which is essentially a modern day version of The Naked Gun, and I don’t doubt they can make a good remake out of it but honestly, just the fact that somebody at Paramount is forcing a Naked Gun remake makes me mad.

Major Hollywood studios, I know you’re not gonna listen to whatever I say anyway but just hear me out, I don’t mind you guys remaking movies left and right but if you’re going to remake movies, stop remaking the classics that we grew up loving just to make a quick buck and just remake the bad movies, the movies that you thought were going to be big hits back in the 70s, 80s and even 90s but ended up bombing big time. This is your chance to remake bad movies that could be even more successful than remaking good movies. Did the Carrie remake make $100 million when it came out? No. Did the remake of Total Recall become a big hit? No. Did you really talk to anyone who was clamoring to see a remake of Straw Dogs? Hell, no. Because nobody wants to see remakes of good movies.

Stop remaking the classics and just remake the bad movies that should’ve been good the first time around. They are more than likely to be more profitable and more successful than remaking classic films that lose out more money at the box office.

Just listen to the advice Jay Sherman from The Critic gave about what’s wrong with Hollywood these days, which considering this came out in 1994, his speech about the state of movies is actually pretty timeless:

Truer words were never spoken.

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