Dylan Stoll | Copy Editor
Featured Image: It appears Hollywood is hell-bent on rehashing old ideas, as opposed to coming up with new ones. | Courtesy of Unsplash
Have you ever been to the movies to see a remake of a film you cherished from your childhood, with the hopes that it would be everything you remembered and more? Did the film meet your expectations, or were you sorely disappointed?
Movie remakes have become a norm for today’s film industry. Over the past decade, there have been countless to choose from: True Grit, Total Recall, Carrie, The Mummy, The Magnificent Seven, Ghostbusters, Godzilla, The Great Gatsby. The list continues.
One could accredit the influx of remakes to a lack of original ideas, or the insatiable greed of money-grubbing producers with little faith in unique, avant-garde screenplays, but one would be lost in speculation. However, one thing is certain: dwarves stand on the shoulders of giants.
As strange as that sounds, there is a degree of truth to this ancient proverb. What is unique in today’s plethora of content? Be it a story, an invention, a book, a film, or some other form of creative expression, is there anything in all of man’s creations that hasn’t been the product of a predecessor?
With that in mind, if you plan on seeing any of the films playing at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this week, there are a few remakes available to choose from.
Widows, a story about a group of widowed women put in a dangerous situation by their late criminal husbands, is a remake of the 1980s British TV show of the same name directed by Steve McQueen. Another is Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green, is a remake of the original Halloween from 1978 which was a narrative based on a deranged, psychopathic killer hell-bent on murder and
mayhem. Gloria Bell, directed by Sebastián Lelio, is another example of a remake—the original is a Chilean film from 2013 entitled
Gloria. The film centres around an aging, single mother desperately searching for Mr. Right.
Jonathan Backman, a former film student planning to attend TIFF this week, says: “I am extremely skeptical about remakes. If it really seems interesting when I watch the trailer and it entices me, then yeah I’ll watch it. Otherwise I say, nowadays, they aren’t worth it.
“I am not a fan of remakes normally, I think a movie should be left alone. Once it’s made, it’s made. That being said, the only director I really trust with remakes would be Martin Scorsese; The Departed was a good remake, but it was more of an American adaptation.”
Scorsese, a world-renowned director known for films such as Goodfellas or Mean Streets, is no stranger to the remake scene. Though many of his films are movie-adaptations of books, such as Shutter Island and Casino, he has also done remakes of movies such as Cape Fear and the previously mentioned The Departed. Both films are excellent productions, garnering scores of 75 and 90 per cent respectively on Rotten Tomatoes—a well-known film-critiquing website.
When asked where he believes the film industry is headed, Backman says: “The industry seems to be over-obsessed with popcorn flicks. Terrible, underdeveloped moving pictures that have way too many explosions and prioritize one-liners over content.
“I think they are going to continue this way for a while, because these movies make money and that’s all they seem to care about these days,” he adds.
From 1995 to 2018, adventure and action movies produced the most profits with $58.39 and $42.91 billion, respectively, in box-office revenues. Even without the figures, all one has to do is go to the movies once a month and see for themselves that action and adventure dominate the genre landscape.
Producers—believe it or not—invest in the genre that is most profitable, and if a movie did well before, it’s assumed that it will do well again.
Rotten Tomatoes set the film True Grit as the number one movie remake. It grossed $252,276,927 worldwide, and considering $24,850,000 was their budget, $226,426,927 is a hefty chunk of change.
Though it didn’t make Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘Top 50 Remakes of the Past 50 Years’ list, the highest grossing movie remake is Beauty
and the Beast, which grossed $1,263,521,126 world-wide. It had a budget of $160,000,000, heaving them $1,103,521,126 in profits.
“Financially? Beauty and the Beast is an animated classic. Doing a live action version of it is only asking for bank,” says Backman.
“Plus it’s not a bad film either, I mean sure, it’s no True Grit, but it’s a good story. Kids and adults alike can appreciate it.”
Christopher Robin, a live-action remake of the animated Winnie the Pooh series only saw $89,961,162 worldwide, and with a budget of $75,000,000, the profits were a paltry $14,961,162.
Perhaps Winnie the Pooh had less of a following, but there are many factors that go into a successful film, and even more that go into a
successful remake.
“I think a remake should be a remake. Don’t change anything,” explains Backman. “The ones that are completely loyal, like word-for-word remakes are the best. Obviously you can’t do it completely identical, but close enough.
“When watching a remake, people normally expect the same feeling they got when they watched the original. So don’t deviate from the original path.”
Some believe that the downfall of a remake is difficult to bring about. Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote: “Why are there so many bad remakes of good movies? It’s a fair enough question. When dealing with a text that has already proven itself functional, it takes an active effort to make it worse. The path of least resistance would lead somewhere agreeable if not extraordinary, perhaps not matching the given source’s greatness but at least managing a respectable measure of success.”
According to Rotten Tomatoes, the worst film remake ever made was Swept Away directed by Guy Ritchie in 2002, a remake of the original Swept Away from 1974. It received a measly five per cent rating, and Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t the only critic to give the atrocity a terrible review: Metacritic gave the film an 18 per cent rating, and The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) slapped the ghastly film with a 3.6 out of 10.
Some other notable films that made Rotten Tomatoes’ 15-worst remakes list are Godzilla at fifth, The Mummy sitting at fourth, The Wicker Man taking third, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, catching up (or rather slowing down) to the aforementioned, feet-dragging first-place holder Swept Away.
When asked what the worst remake he had ever seen was, Backman replied: “I may have to say Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Not that it was extremely bad, it just almost ruined the mythology of Michael Myers.”
The original Halloween from 1978 is considered one of the best horror films available, a timeless cult classic, but the 2007 remake that Backman refers to was chewed up and spit back out by critics. Rotten Tomatoes ranked it as the eighth-worst remake, with a 25 per cent rating. The Film File’s Dustin Putman wrote that the movie was a “foul-mouthed, soulless, low-rent slasher flick that mistakes graphic violence for genuine thrills and sex scenes for character development.”
Green’s adaptation playing at TIFF better fared the reviewer’s storm, as Bryan Bishop of The Verge wrote: “It’s a franchise-wide retcon, a direct sequel to Carpenter’s original that eliminates all other films from the franchise continuity. That move allows Green and his co-writers, Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, to build a film that actually has a narrative reason for existing. They don’t squander the opportunity. They use it to explore the long-lasting consequences violence and trauma can have on victims, and in the process, they entirely rethink what Michael Myers stands for.”
Last year’s TIFF played host to a remake of another classic called Papillon, directed by Michael Noer, an astounding story of perseverance and redemption in a hell-on-earth like none other: a penal colony in Guiana.
The genuine nature of the story demands a remake with similar standards, unfortunately, this was not the case. The 1973 version received a score of 8 out of 10 on IMDb and an 83 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas the remake scored 6.8 out of 10 and 53 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote: “A pall of been-there-done-that hangs over the remake, making it seem familiar even if you’ve never seen it.”
But it would appear that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Whether intentional or not, the film gained a measure of success through its applicability to modern issues in the penal system. Bramesco wrote: “Noer’s turned out a fine film in its own right, and political developments in the decades since the last adaptation have even lent the script a newfound significance. The story may not have changed, but the world into which it’s getting released sure has.”
“To a modern crowd, the film doubles as a valiant argument against privatization. The warden only gets away with the cruelest and most unusual abuses of fundamental dignity through a total lack of oversight due to their remote location. The slave labour that prisoners are forced to perform, the routine humiliations, and the recreational violence feels a bit more pointed in our era of heightened consciousness about the insidious prison-industrial complex,” he adds.
Travers noticed a similar message from the film, but was less optimistic in it’s unveiling. “You could excuse the film’s relentlessly grim violence as a comment on the way current day privatization of prisons veils horrific abuses. But Papillon pushes too hard with diminishing returns.
“Cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski, production designer Tom Meyer and composer David Buckley work overtime to provide Noer with the trappings of an epic. But in the process they’ve reduced the two human beings at the center of the action to figures in a landscape, too distant to leave a mark on our hearts and minds,” Travers continues.
So do remakes deserve a place in today’s, or even the future’s, film industry landscape?
As time passes, the world changes as do our views and societal norms. Remakes offer the audience a refurbishing of old ideas with a modern polish; they bring concepts of the past into today’s lens. Much like historical records maintain our memories of the past, so do remakes in that they resurrect dead, supposed-timeless films, and in so doing, maintain their stories. Even if the remake was terrible, at least the memory of the original lives on, thereby giving another director the chance to truly bring a lost-to-time film back to its former glory.
If it weren’t for the many Batman adaptations, some failing and others succeeding, there would have never been Christopher Nolan’s epic, billion-dollar Dark Knight trilogy; the idea of Batman may have remained the strange, comical and somewhat off-putting Adam West rendition. Thankfully, it did not. And let’s not forget The Last Man on Earth. If it was never remade into The Omega Man, then maybe Francis Lawrence would have never made I Am Legend.
The torch is passed on, so to speak, sometimes to joggers and sometimes to sprinters, but what matters most is that the fire stays lit so that others may have the chance to show the world a flame renewed, a flame that refuses to be forgotten.
