Rather than start more threads bemoaning the current plethora of pointless Hollywood remakes, I think that oputside of special circumstances, we should stick them all in this thread.

Starting with this lot:

Brideshead Revisited
Sunset Boulevard
The Birds
The Day The Earth Stood Still
The Incredible Shrinking Man

Obviously the last two would no doubt benefit from the improvement in SFX but the rest really need tobe left alone. In fact, I can't believe someone thought it was a good idea to remake Sunset Boulevard. Or maybe I can....

Okay - complain away!

hollywood can do remakes because its cheaper to find an old script and just get the director to adapt it then pay a team of script writers to create new works.

Another one for you although I have to admit it looks pretty good:

The trailer for the much talked about remake of the 1940's The Wolf Man has made it online and it's right here for you to see.

Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a man who returns to his ancestral home and is bitten by a werewolf, thus making him a werewolf too. The film also stars Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving and Geraldine Chaplin.

The trailer looks pretty damn good, and we are treated to some shots of the werewolf itself, looking rather large and pretty scary. I love the shot of it running through the crowd of people in what looks like the middle of a party.

Trailer can be seen HERE


The original starred Lon Chaney Jr in 1941 and was a part of Universal's string of horror classics in the 30'sand 40's.

-- Edited by Man In Black at 17:13, 2008-07-31

Plus there's the market there. If a film was a success before, as much as it gets panned or criticised, most original fans will go and see it (though most will deny it). Thus guaranteed income.

What you also have to take into cond=sideration is there has been various scriptwriters strikes of late and a redo is cheap as there is no need for script writing at any great length.

Oh and this ones been mooted for ages. I wasn't a big fan of the original to be honest, so this will slip off my radar for sure

Right thread rule ammendments. As soon as more involved news of the movie comes to light i.e. release dates, posters, stills, news updates etc. It gets moved out of here and into it's own thread...

In fairness its just the mask. Jason isn't visable...

Anything original coming out in hollywood these days? :(

Man In Black wrote:

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Maybe once the writer's strike backlog has been cleared up, hopefully it will.

The only place in Hollywood where original stories do seem to be an ongoing concern (aside from Asia of course) is within the animation studios like Pixar and Dreamworks.

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So Cars 2 and Toy Story 3 don't count then?

 

See? Mollison gets it!

And another remake although this one holds a bit of interest for me:


The remake of Flash Gordon is tearing ahead at breakneck speed it seems as Sony has just assigned two writers to the project months after obtaining the rights to the film.

The writers have already written Dracula Year Zero which Alex Proyas is about to direct, so it would suggest that theres a little more here than a camp remake of a camp, but highly enjoyable, film.

The fact that Breck Eisner is also attached to direct also suggests that this Flash Gordon is going to be something stronger, and perhaps were seeing a return to the original stories rather than the film version weve seen to date.

Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are the two men assigned to writing duties, and yes they do sound like bizarre stage name. Interestingly Eisner is also on directing duties for Creature From the Black Lagoon, and a remake of The Crazies.

Something else that might back that up is the blurb that comes from The Hollywood Reporter which tells us that Flash Gordon focuses on a young polo player who is kidnapped and taken to the distant planet Mongo along with Dale Arden and Hans Zarkov (man, that name rings a bell in my head and the lines start rolling in'there is no cause for alarmalarmalarm.'). On the planet they begin a series of adventures fighting the dictator of the planet called Ming the Merciless and banding together with various groups under his control to overthrow him.

Now youll recognise all of that, but the film version had him as an American football player, while in the original stories he was a polo player.

Well its a good sign that the film is going to get made, previously the film had hung around for years not being looked at, but perhaps the studio think its the right time for the remake. Is it the right time for the audience?


At least it can't be as bad as the recent abominable TV version...

Hollywood raids Europe for another remake says Filmstalker:


Tom Cruise is looking to lead The Tourist, the remake of the 2005 French thriller Anthony Zimmer. While Valkyrie gets moved around the release schedule and we wait to see him play a German war hero who fought a battle against Hitler from inside his ranks, we hear that he may be continuing his spy type roles.

It's interesting considering it's just been announced that Angelina Jolie has taken up the lead of another spy film Edwin A. Salt that Cruise was due to take. With so many spy thrillers on the slate I guess you can have your choice.

The Tourist is to be written by Julian Fellowes, a great writer and someone who really does produce strong stories with great characterisation and dialogue, so already we're looking good for the project.

The original film Anthony Zimmer has a superb premise, much more interesting than the blurb from Variety would suggest. Anthony Zimmer is a man who launders illegal money out of France, however he's being closely tracked by police and so he's had extensive plastic surgery and has a new face and new voice, now he's completely gone to the intelligence community and the mobsters who also want their hands on him.

However they have a plan, they're tracking his mistress who is the only link to him. However she's in on another plan. Having found an innocent man who looks very much like Zimmer, she latches onto him and uses him to throw the trailing groups off Zimmer's scent. Now this innocent man is being tracked by everyone from Interpol to professional Russian killers.

Now that sounds interesting. It's got some great twists in there and with Fellowes adapting the script I'm even more interested did you know he's writing a script for a film called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell?

So add in Tom Cruise to the mix and I think we're going to get a powerful film. However there's two ways it can go for his character, they can make him the innocent or one of protagonists.

Personally I'd like to see him as a protagonist, either one of those chasing him or Zimmer himself, however there are a couple of things that might attract me to the idea of him playing the innocent. One is if this turns into a Hitchcock style thriller, then he could take up the typical Hitchcock leading man role really well, or if there's a few twists in store for the character.

What I wouldn't like to see is Cruise just pick up and play a similar character to the one we've seen before and find him walking the role, that's the Cruise performance that I don't find that interesting.

Could we be seeing ANOTHER Tarzan remake?

Filmstalker:


Stephen Sommers is going to be directing Tarzan, no really he is.

Actually he's in negotiations so there's a chance he still might not direct it, however the fact that Stuart Beattie is adapting the script from the Edgar Rice Burroughs story is exciting, Beattie wrote Collateral, 30 Days of Nights, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

The story comes from The Hollywood Reporter, and I'm wondering if it isn't such good news to have Stephen Sommers directing the film.

Previously we heard Guillermo del Toro had been looking to direct a script written by John Collee who had written Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World but del Toro is a tad busy so it's onto pastures new.

Personally I would have thought a darker more fantastical version of the story from del Toro would have been better, and then Hollywood could have shouted about a reimagining of the story and a return to the origins and all that rubbish.

This way we are probably going to get an action adventure film much like The Mummy or Van Helsing, now is that the Tarzan you want to see?

Filmstalker says DeNiro out - Winstone in for Edge of Darkness:


What an excellent choice. After Robert De Niro left the Edge of Darkness production leaving Mel Gibson standing alone, the news has come that Ray Winstone is in negotiations to take his place, and I think that's wonderful news.

Martin Campbell and the team have made an excellent choice, and I would dare to say that they should have done that from the beginning. De Niro has lost his edge, and he's lost it for some time now, Winstone has most definitely not.

I wonder though, will Ray Winstone, if he secures the role, be playing the part with an American accent or will he be playing an British man abroad? I don't think it really matters, not after the performance he pulled off in The Departed (Filmstalker review).

One thing is clear though, Ray Winstone is going from strength to strength in Hollywood but despite that he keeps signing up for smaller British based roles, which is superb for us as an audience.

I really don't think it's a loss to see Robert De Niro off the project, I mean these days he's more comfortable doing cheap comedy than strong thrillers.

The news of his negotiations comes from Variety, and if successful he would join other stars on the set of Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness including Mel Gibson and Danny Huston. Now Huston and Winstone together, I think, would make a great combination.

Another superhero is supposedly up for the "reboot" treatment according to Filmstalker:


There are loads of superhero characters being rebooted these days. Batman and Superman to name a couple. Now Fox say they are considering rebooting a character, and it's Daredevil.

The last imagining had Ben Affleck as Daredevil. Is the time right to start again?

Daredevil was last made into a film in 2003. Ben Affleck was the man himself, and it also starred Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell and Jon Favreau. It had a fairly mixed reception back then. But now 20th Century Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman, says that a Daredevil reboot is a possibility. He was talking to IESB, through First Showing.net.

A Daredevil, to use your words, reboot, is something we are thinking very seriously about.


Rothman thinks that time is a great healer, and that given the right amount of downtime a character can be successfully rebooted. He sights The Dark Knight as the ultimate example:


...when they did Batman Begins, the first Nolan movie, that you can have made some mistakes along the way or movies that the audience wasn't that crazy about and then given the proper amount of time and the right creative vision behind it, you can, to use your word, reboot. It needs someone, it needs a director, honestly, who has a genuine vision. What we wouldn't do is just do it for the sake of doing it.


Some comforting words there, that they aren't going to go ahead with it regardless. Would you be interested in a new Daredevil film? Does it need it?


I think the answer is "Nope".

To be fair, the Ben Affleck version wasn't *that* bad per se - rather it was too short and under-developed with too many villians for a debut film.