Did you hear? Clue is getting remade! You don’t remember Clue? C’mon! ‘70s cult comedy based off of the popular board game with Tim Curry as Wadsworth the butler, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White… Oh, you really don’t remember it. Well, that would make sense considering that Clue was a box office flop of considerable proportions. Actually, it doesn’t seem to really make much sense that a remake of such an unknown and critically panned comedy was greenlighted in the first place.
Then again, movie studios haven’t been providing much logical reasoning behind their decisions these days anyway. Today, you’re generally far more likely to find a batch of remakes and adaptations on the upcoming release slate than any original material. Just take a glimpse at last week’s box office returns: one remake, more than 10 adaptations, and several sequels/prequels/whatever you want to call them.
Rather than simply balk at the appalling lack of originality that Hollywood so blatantly demonstrates, let’s examine where the problem originated. Though Hollywood has been known to produce remakes and adaptations for some time, today’s release schedule is littered with a far heavier concentration of such productions than ever before. And the recent development of the titan “franchise” is the probable criminal in this industry conspiracy.
Twilight
And even so, regardless of the quality of films such as the X-Men series or even the Jason Bourne series, it’s a depressing notion, realizing that the majority of movies produced annually are incestually derived from other material. Hollywood keeps replicating the same patterned plot structure and, even worse, is literally making films that are intentional replicas of others. This all begs the obvious question: where is the originality?
Well, usually, a film critic would suggest that audiences turn to arthouse and indie films for true artistic and authentic creative genius, but even then you run into the shoddy, hollow commercialism of film studios. Take the recent Sunshine Cleaning, for instance. Does it not provoke thoughts of such other quirky indie comedies as, say, Juno or Little Miss Sunshine (granted, the producers of both films were the same) or even classics such as Rushmore or Fargo?
But our griping can’t do much to change things as long as we’re willing and able to shovel massive amounts of money into the pockets of Hollywood fat cats. Though the film industry may be progressively deteriorating in the quality and originality of its output, inversely it is generating more profit than ever. In turn, this increased profit drives studio bosses to greenlight more idiotic, ridiculous and contrived projects simply because they may be tied to an established television series (Sex and the City? – the show is fantastic, but the movie was a dense, boring and poorly arranged flick), novel, play or a previously successful film, in the interest of replicating such revenue.
One thing that doesn’t seem to correlate with this theory, however, is Hollywood’s penchant for remaking films. Yes, the reason is obviously attributable to a want of box office revenue, but, the problem is, remakes don’t seem to generate much profit on average. Often remakes are based on little-known or poorly-received B-movies. Just recently the film The Last House on the Left opened in theaters. It was a remake of a so-so Wes Craven original of the same name, which was, in turn, based on a far better Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. Today’s The Last House on the Left fared better at the box office than the original, but not well enough to warrant its production in the first place. And, at the same time, it was savaged by critics and experienced an at most lukewarm ad campaign.
Hollywood has hit the proverbial jackpot in discovering that we will eat up any scrap of recycled material they throw at us, even if it is as ridiculously idiotic as the Fast and the Furious sequel in theaters now. The film industry won’t come to realize that they need to put a little effort into their productions until we realize that their productions are exactly the same each time, just with a different mask. But, rest assured, even though our generation may be responsible for the destruction of creative filmmaking as we know it, at least we didn’t propel a film like Three Men and a Baby to the top of the box office in 1987. Now there’s a piece of original material we can all live without.
, Mamma Mia!, Marley and Me, Get Smart – what do all these films have in common (besides the fact that they were all decidedly average, if not below average, in quality)? They were all adaptations of some sort and were all among the top box office titans of last year. Somewhere over the past few decades, Hollywood adopted the belief that the average American would rather watch a movie remaking another film or produced from another source, than a film based upon original material. The industry seems to find it difficult to distinguish between a good box office heavy-hitter and the commonplace remake: it’s called quality.
