Movie remakes getting 'beyond ridiculous'

Opinion - Last week, Disney's Lilo & Stitch - the latest “live action remake” of one of the storied studio's beloved animated movies - became the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of the year so far.

More recently, Jurassic World: Rebirth - a remake in all but name that sold itself on its familiarity - garnered one of the biggest box office opening weekends of the year so far.

The third Superman reboot in 20 years just opened in theatres alongside yet another Smurfs reboot, and we're weeks away from the third new iteration of the Fantastic Four since 2005.

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The centrality of these films speak to how increasingly reliant Hollywood is on doing the same thing over and over again. To a certain extent, this has always been true, but these days, it's gotten beyond ridiculous. We are drowning in remakes.

Remakes have always been part of the Hollywood paradigm – The Wizard of Oz (1939) - arguably the most iconic movie of all time - was a remake. Iconic Humphrey Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon (1941) was a remake. Alfred Hitchock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was a remake of his own 1934 film of the same name.

Some of my favourite movies – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986) and The Blob (1988), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Dawn of the Dead (2004) - are remakes. Many of these examples justified themselves by being made long enough after their inspirations that special effects had advanced to the point where new interpretations of the concepts were possible, even warranted.

But such artistic validations for remaking movies have long since fallen by the wayside, and the modern proliferation of remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels is unfortunately more attributable to the same force responsible for most of the bad trends in modern filmmaking: commerce.

Yes, show business has always been a business. But the “show“ part demands that it not always feel like such a brazenly commercial enterprise. They're selling magic. In this regard, Hollywood has massively dropped the ball over the last few decades. It's never felt more corporatised and data driven, and less about storytelling and expression. Or magic.

Instinct and creative punts used to be a big part of the film business, even into the era of corporate ownership, but every decision these days must be justified by some sort of creativity-dampening corporate risk aversion.

This risk aversion demands that the audience already be familiar with the product, hence the rise of intellectual property (i.e, adaptations of existing properties, including prior movies) as the main driver in modern filmmaking.

It means even the movies that aren't remakes, the ones that are cited as “original content”, are all derived from something that already exists, so they almost feel like remakes. The second biggest grossing Hollywood movie of the year so far behind Lilo & Stitch is the New Zealand-shot A Minecraft Movie, adapted from the incredibly popular video game.

Charming as it was – you had to smile at the Huntly Power Station having its big screen moment – if A Minecraft Movie is what stands for “original content” these days, then we are in trouble.

I consider the live action remakes of animated movies to be the absolute worst kind of remake, utterly devoid of anything resembling an artistic rationale. Their very existence offends me, and they're solely justifiable as corporate asset management.

No mode of cinema has ever felt more craven and creatively bereft - these abominations are anti-cinema and anti-art. In addition to Lilo & Stitch, Disney also released a live action Snow White this year, which was less successful. They have a live action Moana coming down the pike, jarringly close to the recent release of Moana 2.

And the trend has now unfortunately extended beyond Disney with the recent huge success of the How to Train Your Dragon live action remake. It was so closely aligned with the animated film, I felt like I'd already seen it while I watched the familiar beats play out. To point out the obvious: if all we do is remake earlier movies, there'll be nothing left to remake in the future.

Original cinema is still being made and succeeding – just look at the runaway success of Sinners – but this is very much the exception these days, as opposed to the rule. Remakes are squeezing out all the other kinds of films.

Of the top 10 grossing movies of 2024, the only one you could perhaps argue was an “original” film was Wicked, which was adapted from a stage musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Every other movie on the list was part of an existing franchise.

The vast majority of the highest profile movies of this year are all derived works too. Some of these are good films (28 Years Later destroyed me), but as much as everything is in the execution, it's clear our focus is in the wrong place.

Still to come this year are new versions of The Running Man (which at least looks vastly different to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film from 1988, which famously strayed from the Stephen King source material); I Know What You Did Last Summer (a legacy sequel that also wants you to think it's a remake); The Naked Gun (starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson); and Anaconda.

That last one could actually be fun – it's apparently a meta comedy about a film crew remaking the 1997 film Anaconda, who run into a real... well, you know.

As much as I want to blame studios for this, we, the audience, must take some responsibility for our lemming-like tendency to embrace the familiar. If we stop rewarding this behaviour, there will hopefully at some point be a trend back towards original stories.

All that said, I am very much ready for a new remake of The Blob.