The reboot/remake is becoming increasingly more popular, with old favourites being turned into new movies or the now popular spin-off TV shows, with Lethal Weapon and Mallrats being the latest to be announced.
The idea is of course not new, one of our favourite films of all time John Carpenter’s The Thing was a remake of 1951 classic The Thing From Another World.
In general, some uproar will come at first from fans, but in general, most movie goers would it seems to appear, accept that this is a fairly cheap way of movie companies releasing films to an already open audience and understand why it’s done.
The trouble is of course for every good reboot/remake, examples in our opinion include Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Star Trek; Batman Begins and from film to TV, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we face the bad reboot/remakes which can often head straight to DVD! We would include Poltergeist; A Nightmare on Elm Street; Arthur and Clash of the Titans. Not even having a cameo from the original won’t save them!
We often accept the bad ones as we see them out of curiosity, so sometimes our mindset will make us believe they are terrible, but the general feeling we get is the same feeling of a bad sequel, we ill always have the original that we loved.
We tried to think of a good thing about the reboot/remake, and whilst watching The A-Team film, inspired by the TV show, it came to us. They can often give us back story which can be fun to see, in this
They can often give us back story which can be fun to see, in this film, for example, we see how the team got together and how B.A. got a fear of the air!
Over on TV, this theory is put to great success with Bates Motel, where we follow Norman Bates and how he will eventually become the big screen Psycho!
Prequels are of course a popular choice, with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit; The Equalizer; Monsters University and X-Men: First Class to name a few.
Sometimes though the change can be bad, the excellent Michael Mann, we feel got it wrong with Miami Vice, as the film brought back none of the memories we had from the TV show. Although change can indeed be good, we would argue 21 Jump Street is an excellent example of this, going from its TV drama routes to a great comedy.
The other change that causing many a reboot issues is the toning down to reach a wider audience, the most recent example being ultra-violent Eighties classic, Robocop, becoming a family friendly 12a.
Not that rating should affect a film’s success, the original Police Academy featured nudity etc and had a 15 rating but its subsequent sequels removed that to give it the longevity it had with its PG certificate sequels.
For us the biggest problem is casting, James Bond is a prime example. Daniel Craig can be seen as great casting whereas George Lazenby isn’t.
Colin Farrell is no Arnold Schwarzenegger as viewers of Total Recall’s remake will know. Maria Bello, whilst a great actress wasn’t Rachel Weisz in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and of course Tokyo Drift, the 3rd in the Fast and Furious franchise suffered with no Vin Diesel or Paul Walker and as attractive as Halle Berry maybe, we would much have preferred Michelle Pfeiffer, in a stand alone Catwoman film.
Casting indeed does seem to be a lot of the reason Ghostbusters reboot is getting so much hate, with the male leads being cast as women. Casting seems to be the biggest issue all the time, from Jennifer Lawrence being cast as Katniss in the Hunger Games, to Daniel Craig as a blond 007 in Casino Royale!
I understand it of course, a personal favourite of mine, Fright Night, was remade and I just couldn’t imagine anyone other than Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent, I still feel the same now, yet the film cast David Tennant, a favourite of mine in the remake.
The reason I bring up Fright Night is as much as I didn’t like the idea of it, the remake isn’t that bad, it brought back the characters and story I love, and of course its helped by a bugger budget.
However, it will never be as good as the original, and that’s the main point with remakes and reboots, whatever they do, and they appear to be here to stay, we don’t have to watch them, and if we do and hate them, we’ll always have the orginals as we said earlier!
What are your good and bad points of remakes/reboots? Do you have a most and least favourite one? We hope they never remake Jaws, is there a film you hope will always be left alone? We would love to hear from you here at Barking Mad About Films.
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