The recent trend toward remakes is problematic. A remake can be a vast improvement on the original but often times it's just a thinly veiled cash grab. Total Recall comes to mind as an example of the latter. With only 22 years between these two films, there was not that much that new CGI technology could do to improve the story. The original wasn't a masterpiece, but it was a fun sci-fi flick worth 90 minutes and a bag of popcorn. The remake included script and tone changes that actually made the story less coherent and the cast seemed ambivalent at best. Even though the second film wasn't orders of magnitude worse, it still felt like a complete waste of time and money. There are so many great sci-fi and fantasy books to draw from, why go back to this particular book/movie to redo something that was done pretty well the first time? If this film's remake is to be taken as the example, then it's time the Harry Potter series remakes began.
On the flip side, the original Cape Fear was released in 1962 and the remake in 1991 and although I enjoyed both of them, I sincerely felt the latter improved on the experience. Robert De Niro was far more sinister than Robert Mitchum as the antagonist. And the style of filmmaking had evolved quite a bit in the near 30 years between the films. So I'm a fan of remakes as long as there are good artistic reasons for doing it and not just a payday for the studio.
Overall there's more content than can ever be realistically harvested for making scripted films, but the brake this creative output is always profits. To flip that script, though, consider Blumhouse Films, which is a studio 100% driven by profits and nothing but, yet they consistently churn out really good films like "Get out", "The Purge" and "The Invisible Man" (another remake). Their model is to produce a high volume of low budget films with the expectation that a few will be big hits while most will make little money at all. Yet somehow they are producing some great artistic content. I think they are demonstrating that you don't need $200 to make a great film.
On the flip side, the original Cape Fear was released in 1962 and the remake in 1991 and although I enjoyed both of them, I sincerely felt the latter improved on the experience. Robert De Niro was far more sinister than Robert Mitchum as the antagonist. And the style of filmmaking had evolved quite a bit in the near 30 years between the films. So I'm a fan of remakes as long as there are good artistic reasons for doing it and not just a payday for the studio.
Overall there's more content than can ever be realistically harvested for making scripted films, but the brake this creative output is always profits. To flip that script, though, consider Blumhouse Films, which is a studio 100% driven by profits and nothing but, yet they consistently churn out really good films like "Get out", "The Purge" and "The Invisible Man" (another remake). Their model is to produce a high volume of low budget films with the expectation that a few will be big hits while most will make little money at all. Yet somehow they are producing some great artistic content. I think they are demonstrating that you don't need $200 to make a great film.
Why is it so?
~Julius Sumner Miller
~Julius Sumner Miller
