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Pop quiz, hot shot: What do “Cruel Intentions,” “A Colt Is My Passport,” “Night of the Hunter,” “Possession,” “The Faculty,” and “Vertigo” all have in common? Now that I think of it, at least two different things come to mind. The first is that they all should have spawned gratuitously sleazed out direct-to-video sequels that recast Amy Adams in the lead role and aired on Cinemax every other night for the entirety of my high school years (shout out to Roger Kumble, the James Mangold of Adrian Lynes). The second — and perhaps more broadly relevant — aspect that binds those movies together is that Hollywood is currently in the process of remaking each and every one of them.
Some, like Gareth Evans’ “A Colt Is My Passport,” are already in the can. Others, like Robert Downey Jr.’s “Vertigo,” are still in the “ominous threat” stage of development. But regardless as to whether they’re right over the horizon or still just percolating in a series of cursed email chains, each of these remakes is misbegotten for the same reason: They’re all based on objective masterpieces. “But David,” you might say, “isn’t one’s response to art an inherently subjective experience?” To which I would simply reply: “You are in no way entitled to your own wrong opinion about a movie where Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall, and Elijah Wood save their high school from salt-phobic aliens while swagged out in late ’90s Tommy Hilfiger.”
So I guess that’s three things these films all have in common? Whatever, I’m not here to count — I’m here to lend my support to the ongoing argument that Hollywood needs to flip the script on its approach to remakes. In short: Leave good movies alone and devote the same attention to remaking bad ones instead.
In slightly less short: Forget the IP that people love with all their might, and focus instead on the IP that people recognize against their will. Forego the classics that audiences feel protective towards, and target the short-fallers that are best remembered for their title. In an age where content is king and studios only exist to create shareholder value for their corporate overlords, executives have become so fixated on brand recognition that Disney would sooner bet $200 million — or more! — on another crack at “Tron” than give someone a fraction of that budget to try their hand at something new. The “Jurassic World” franchise notwithstanding, diminishing returns beget diminishing returns, and there’s only so many times you can charge people top dollar for reheated leftovers of their favorite childhood meals before they lose their appetite altogether.
But. But! What if you served those same people fresh and completely reformulated versions of the processed garbage they slopped up as kids (or even as grown adults who’d been conditioned not to expect any better)? What if you took the scraps of processed nostalgia, the kind of food that people fondly recall but would never eat again by choice, and challenged today’s most inventive chefs to reimagine them for an audience whose palette has been starved of flavor for so long that they’ve forgotten the taste of a hot meal? If the faint whiff of a memory is all that’s motivating people to pay for these movies (as producers and consumers), wouldn’t it be more prudent to improve upon the past rather than risk constantly reinforcing the idea that the present is so much worse?
See: Edgar Wright’s “The Running Man,” for example. Really, see it! It’s not bad! Nor, um, is it a remake. Let’s ignore that for a second. The movie — faithfully adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, and sharing almost nothing in common with the rancid Arnold Schwarzenegger version that first immortalized the book on film — is 100 percent a mulligan, in that I find it impossible to believe that Paramount would have spent nine figures on adapting this IP if not for the name recognition seeded by the previous take. It doesn’t matter that “The Running Man” 1.0 isn’t streaming anywhere, or that its limp TV satire of Reagan-era consumerism feels like ancient history, or even that our last remaining scientists are still trying to figure out how a movie featuring Yaphet Kotto, Jesse “the Body” Ventura, and homicidal ice hockey could still be so bland — the only thing that matters is that “The Running Man” as a three-word phrase has retained some vague and unquantifiable purchase over the last several decades. The casual pop consumer’s brain recognizes it as “a real thing” in much the same way as the average executive’s brain does, even if only by osmosis; for better or worse, it comes to both of them pre-installed with a credibility that original content has to earn on its own terms.
A credibility that endures without being hamstrung by any real association to quality. “The Running Man” faces strong headwinds thanks to mediocre reviews and stiff competition at the box office, but — unlike “The Roses,” “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Road House,” or any number of the actual remakes that have been foisted upon us in recent months —the film will at least be spared the indignity of being judged against the impossible standards of its predecessor. Even the people who love Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man” don’t really like Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man,” which is what gave Wright license to stick closer to the source material while also cheating it forward to be more relevant to the modern world.
In stark contrast to Hollywood’s updated versions of “Robocop,” “Point Break,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (to pick literally the first three movies that jumped to mind, all of them built on the reputations of unassailable classics), it’s clear that Wright was committed to preserving the raw edges of his film’s story rather than sanding them down, and even the least successful elements of his “Running Man” are strengthened by a sociopolitical anger that’s rare to find in modern studio films of its size. Had the previous film made from King’s book not been such an ineffective piece of satire, it’s possible that a corporation as odious as Paramount Skynet — whose allegiance to The Network grows clearer every day — would never have rubber-stamped such an unambiguous “fuck you” to David Ellison’s friends in our government.
Of course, there are only so many bad movies that are ripe to be remade; only so many movies that are famous enough to feel like safe investments, but also flawed enough to guarantee that Hollywood executives will feel like creative geniuses for improving upon them. Hollywood has acted upon very few of them. David Lowery’s “Pete’s Dragon” is one obvious choice; Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” perhaps a slightly more contentious pick.
Again, there’s a reason why the movie that felt best-suited as a peg for this article isn’t actually a remake, although I suppose I could have waited a few weeks for Sony Pictures’ new “Anaconda,” which sounds like a perfect test for what I’m talking about despite being framed as more of a meta reboot; no one has any particular attachment to the original (much as I’d argue that no movie where Jon Voight gets swallowed alive by a giant snake could ever be considered truly bad), but its title carries an ineffable weight of some kind, and the comforting familiarity it triggers is deepened by the sense that a new “Anaconda” is more likely to build on our collective memory of the old one than to tarnish it. Typically, however, remakes have only been made as backhanded compliments by directors who’ve seen room for improvement in their own work: Think Alfred Hitchcock revisiting “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” or Michael Mann evolving “L.A. Takedown” into “Heat,” or Yasujiro Ozu turning “A Story of Floating Weeds” into just “Floating Weeds” (it’s cleaner).
More often, successful remakes have been created from beloved source material by people who had no previous relationship to it, but even these are few and far between. “Cape Fear.” “The Thing.” “Dawn of the Dead.” Many interesting attempts (“Nightmare Alley”) and most abominations (Rupert Wainright’s “The Fog,” Len Wiseman’s “Total Recall”) fall under this category. And then of course — with perhaps the highest hit-rate — there are those instances when people have seen the opportunity to rejigger a foreign-language film for an English-speaking audience (“The Departed,” “Sorcerer,” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria,” which is not bad, as you might have mistakenly been led to believe, but in fact very good). At a time when most young people refuse to watch a video clip of Theo Von’s podcast without having subtitles on, however, the transliteration model may not have the same currency that it once did (though widespread exposure to “Save the Green Planet!” is sadly not to blame for the underwhelming box office of “Bugonia”).
Bad remakes of good movies are constant, bad remakes of bad movies are statistically non-existent, good remakes of good movies are almost impossible, and so — by process of elimination in an industry that only considers making original shit under extreme duress — good remakes of bad movies are Hollywood’s greatest fount of untapped potential this side of video game adaptations and seeing what might happen if you gave Ridley Scott a kilo of cocaine.
And the sooner the powers that be make this seachange in their thinking, the better. I mean, we simply cannot afford to do another “Starship Troopers” while millions of people on Twitter are still failing to grasp the point of the original. But a new “Hackers” where Jenna Ortega or whatever leads a team of roller-blading computer nerds who steal billions in ill-gotten crypto from the president’s large adult sons? That’s a hit. “Conspiracy Theory” for the era of virulent rightwing message boards? You wouldn’t even have to recast Mel Gibson. “Romeo Must Die” with Andrew Koji and Junglepussy? I’m just saying things now. “Tango & Cash” but it’s the Apple Dance and Tap-to-Pay? Amazing. Everyone knows the future is going to be bad. But given the most plausible options left available to us, perhaps it’s possible that bad might be our best hope for something better.
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