Thursday, June 14, 2012
Remakes and reboots and sequels! Oh sigh!
 |
| DARK SHADOWS REDUX: Hollywood's idea of summer camp. |
It’s a trend I’ve been noticing for a while, but it seems to have come to a head summer, especially with genre films. A month into the summer movie season we’ve already been “treated” to two different versions of Snow White (“Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman”), a campy remake of the ’60s-era gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” a totally unneeded sequel, “Men in Black III” and a movie based on an old board game, “Battleship.”
None of these movies did terrifically well at the box office, and after only seeing just two of these flicks myself, I’m not surprised. Both “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Dark Shadows” were OK films. They were at best, a pleasantly diverting way to spend a late spring/early summer night, but they were ultimately forgettable. My wife and I only went to see them out of mild curiosity. She was a fan of the “Dark Shadows” TV show and was intrigued by the idea of the quirky Johnny Depp playing the original self-loathing vampire, Barnabas Collins; and we both went to “Snow White” just to see if Kristen Stewart (“Twilight”) could really act. (The jury is still out on that one.) In retrospect we probably should have waited to rent them on DVD.
 |
| BATTLESHIP: Sank at the box office. |
The reason I won’t even rent “Battleship” is because of its lame concept. I’m not wasting two hours of my life nor any of my hard-earned cash just to hear Liam Nelson yell “You’ve sank my battleship!” at some CGI alien. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea to make a movie based on a board game. What’s next?
“Operation: The Movie?”
“Candy Land: The Motion Picture?”
“Chutes and Ladders?”
Sigh!
 |
| TOTAL RECALL: I seem to recall seeing this movie before . . . . |
Do Hollywood executives really think that audiences have such short-term memories that they need to be re-introduced to the Marvel Comics web slinger after only five years? Yes 2007’s “Spiderman III” sucked and Tobey Maguire is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth to play the teenaged/twentysomething Peter Parker. So just recast the part and move on to a brand new story. If nothing else, the success of “The Avengers” shows us that you don’t have to do an “origin story” to make a successful comic book-based movie.
Later in the summer will come yet another remake, this time of the “classic” Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick “Total Recall.” Supposedly this version will stick closer to the reality-bending elements of Philip K. Dick’s original story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” If so, why not just call it that and forgo the all the big budget action sequences and the iconic three-breasted woman of the 1990 original and avoid the inevitable comparisons to its predecessor?
I don’t know if I’ll necessarily skip this one, but I won’t be seeing it opening weekend. I’ll wait to see what kind of word-of-mouth it gets before plunking down another $10 for a movie I’ve essentially seen a dozen times before.
 |
| THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: Those other Spiderman films were just a fly in the ointment |
What is most worrying about this trend is the lesson Hollywood execs might take away from it. Sure most of these remakes and reboots weren’t/won’t be hits, but most look like they will at least make their money back. Meanwhile, their one, big-budget all new film, “John Carter” crashed and burned at the box office.
Disney reportedly spent $250 million on the film which was based on the first book of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of novels, “A Princess of Mars.” In its opening weekend it only made $30 million domestically while doing slightly better overseas with a $70 million haul. It quickly disappeared from theaters shortly afterward, pretty much guaranteeing it wouldn’t make its money back.
That’s a shame too, because Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, written in the early 1900s, are science fiction classics, and in many ways inspired all the space opera epics that came after it, from the “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rodgers” serials in the ’30s and ’40s, to the “Star Wars” movies at the both the end of the 20th century and beginning of this century. Given time to catch on, “John Carter” could have found a bigger audience. (It’s due out on DVD soon, so perhaps those sales will help unsully the film’s bad reputation.)
 |
| MEN IN BLACK III: Can we user their Neuralyzer to forget this film was ever made? |
This would be a huge mistake. Hollywood is already loosing movie attendance to other media – video games and Internet streaming video services such as NetFlicks and Youtube – where there is a ton of original content available. Some of it even approaches Hollywood quality. (More on that too in another future blog post).
As more and better quality HD video cameras find their way into consumers’ hands and film editing – once the domain of only highly skilled professionals – becomes easier and easier to do on even the most inexpensive of home computers, then Hollywood may find itself becoming more and more irrelevant as people choose to bypass them, and get their entertainment straight from these amateur filmmakers themselves.
If Hollywood wants to avoid this fate, then they are going to have to get pretty creative.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think u hit the nail on the head. Those truly creative individuals that made Hollywood what it was in its heyday have now moved on to other genres which did not exist back then. Hollywood is destined to go the way of the dinosaur while video games become more like interactive movies. I am not sure what this will eventually morph into but I think it is safe to say that Hollywood either needs to evolve or it will no longer exist in the near future.
ReplyDelete