Don't Like - Our Bankrupt Remake Culture
Look, I could have written this post two years ago when I started this blog. I know this isn’t a surprising opinion coming from me. In fact, I’ve refrained from writing about it because I thought it would be boring. After all, there’s lot of good writing about this phenomenon out there already. A quick google search will give you lots of smart and good articles about what “IP” is doing to our cinematic culture.1 The cliff notes are: nothing good.2 But the worst part of our bankrupt remake culture is just how bad it can be.3 This week, I think I became aware of the worst iteration yet… The Harold and the Purple Crayon movie. Now, if you don’t know, Harold and the Purple Crayon is a classic children’s story. It’s a beautiful 64 page story about a child named Harold who has a purple crayon that he can draw anything with. The story begins with him drawing the moon and going for a walk. It’s creative in a very pure sort of way. Each page features Harold and some purple lines against a white background with some words underneath. It’s extremely simple, which is what makes it inspiring because the story itself is about creativity and dreams. It’s magical and deeply human stuff4 but magical and deeply human stuff is incompatible with our broken culture. So instead of making a movie that stokes the imagination, we get a weird live action version where Harold is 43 year old man who enters the real world and encounters an evil villain who wants to steal his magic crayon so that he can take over the world like some kind of mad evil genius, resulting in a cataclysmic duel at the end. However, the worst part of this movie isn’t that the plot is unoriginal but that it is unimaginative because that is what the source material is all about. The greater tragedy still is that there are many such cases—at least Twisters is supposed to be fun.
We already know the answer to why studios won’t make original movies: they just want to make money! That’s it. Unfortunately, their shareholder gain is our viewing pleasure loss. There’s not much to do about that—unless you’re the head of a studio hiring new people to green light projects, then please get in touch.
In a truly wild turn, here’s an incomplete list of remakes on the horizon: Highlander with Henry Cavill, Friday Night Lights, Robocop, The Wild Bunch is currently being remade with Jamie Foxx and Peter Dinklage, Cannonball, 9 to 5, The Devil Wears Prada, Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, Glen Close is remaking Sunset Boulevard (could be good as I do love Glenn Close but it won’t be the original), The Dirty Dozen, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Dirty Dancing, The Crow, The Naked Gun, Big Trouble in Little China with The Rock, Bullitt from Stevie Spielberg, and probably still many more! (p.s. Thanks to Ryan O’Rourke for your deep knowledge of all things Hollywood!
It isn’t always awful, Top Gun Maverick was awesome in theaters.
There are other books in the series, which I haven’t read. I don’t know how big the story goes but the movie’s title is only after the first book, which I’ve loved since I was a kid.