Some of the best movies are remakes. Think of Carpenter’s The Thing, Cronenberg’s the Fly or Pacino’s Scarface. These movies are amazing, and many people don’t even realize they are remakes of older films from a previous era.
However, these are rare exceptions. Most of the time when Hollywood reboots or remakes a film, it ends up being hot garbage—but why?
6
Nostalgia Isn’t Narrative
Hollywood loves nothing more than easy marketing through brand recognition. It’s the same reason we see so many sequels. Going with a name or franchise that people are already familiar with is seen as safer. The thing is, trying to play on feelings of nostalgia for Ghostbusters or Conan the Barbarian won’t help you much if the story in your new film is bad.
The whole reason people liked the original film was because they loved the narrative. Any movie that tells a good story well has a decent shot at becoming a hit, and thinking you can just stick a popular name on a bad movie is extremely short-sighted and frankly doomed to fail from the outset.
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5
Movies Are the Product of a Time and a Place
Robocop starring Peter Weller and directed by the legendary Paul Verhoeven, is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s both an amazing sci-fi action film, and a biting satire of the corporate greed that exemplified the 80s. Like most cyberpunk fiction, Robocop works at least in part because of the era it satirizes. The excess, the shoulder pads, they’re all part of a unique flavor.
Which is why the 2014 remake just falls flat on its face. Trying to update Robocop to do for the 2010s what the original did for the 1980s just doesn’t work. Smarmy news pundits and wars in the Middle East just don’t have the same charm. When a movie’s magic is tied to its era, a reboot or remake is probably a poor bet.
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4
You Can’t Force Chemistry in a Cast
Some movies have a cast that add up to more than the sum of their individual contributions. The movie just works, because the way these actors play off each other and complement one another’s performances is just phenomenal. That was the main reason (apart from poor writing) that the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot did so poorly.
The original cast were lightning in a bottle, and the actors in the newer film just didn’t have that level of connection. It came across as forced and inauthentic. I can’t even blame the casting folks too much, or the individual actors. Sometimes people just don’t click on-screen.
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3
Studios Don’t Understand What Made the Original Great
Is there a group of people who understand movies less than studio executives? Not only is any movie where executives interfere with the creative direction practically guaranteed to fail, studios seem to greenlight remakes that obviously don’t capture anything that made the original film a success.
Take the 2015 Point Break—apart from missing director Kathryn Bigelow’s sharp directorial skills, the movie misses that the 1991 original became a cult classic in large part because of how gloriously stupid it is, how much style it has, and how likable the characters are. Instead, the new movie takes itself too seriously, wants to be way too gritty, and tries to wow you with sterile, unrelenting, and therefore uninteresting action sequences.
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2
The Tone Changes for No Reason
Yes, I’m going to put another remake of a Verhoeven film on the list, but how on Earth did they think turning the campy original Total Recall into a self-serious, slick, humorless dystopian sci-fi film would work? To be fair, this newer film is perhaps more faithful to Philip K. Dick’s original story. After all, the whole Mars thing was invented for Verhoeven’s film, but that doesn’t make the remake a better film!
More importantly, if they didn’t intend for it to be a Total Recall remake, and instead a new adaptation of We Can Remember It for you Wholesale, then why use the title they made up for the first film? It’s a cynical cash grab at best, and a tone deaf waste of everyone’s time at worst.
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1
They Try to Launch a New Franchise Instead of One Good Movie
I didn’t hate Tom Cruise’s The Mummy reboot. I quite enjoyed it actually, but the movie suffers quite a lot from the clear intention that it should launch an MCU-style film franchise. While the Stephen Sommers Mummy films with Brendan Fraser ended up becoming a franchise organically, it seems the bean counters and executives can’t just allow a good movie to stand on its own, and then naturally lead to a franchise because fans demand more. No, instead they ham-fistedly try to set up a bunch of future movies at the cost of the film you’re currently watching.
Even Iron Man, the movie that launched the MCU, wasn’t made to do that. The post-credits scene with Nick Fury was an Easter egg for fans. If the movie bombed, that would be it. Nothing had been greenlit or planned. So Iron Man was free to just be a good movie on its own terms, and the rest is history.
The thing that really gets my goat is that most of the time when a movie remake or reboot is slated, it’s for a movie that doesn’t need to be rebooted or remade. The original is not only fine, but still a great film to watch.
Movies like Back to the Future or The Neverending Story are timeless, and they are perfectly preserved in high quality thanks to the magic of digital media. So let’s enjoy them as they are, and spend time and energy on new movies with new original stories.
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