Can confirm. I'm 38 and I cringe every time I see a remake of some 20 or 30 year old movie or show. Come up with something original instead of going for the low hanging fruit. Also, use less CGI and more practical effects.
A good story is a good story. Lots of CGI or no CGI doesn't change that fact. There are lots of movies with no CGI that are just garbage.
The issue is studios trying to avoid having to write a good story trying to mask a mediocre story with lots and lots of mediocre CGI. Why? Because it's faster to create lots of computer effects than to come up with a great story. It's also a lot easier to create an assembly line for CGI than it is to create one for great stories
As a counterpoint to this I think the "why" of the remake is really important. Id actually like to see them do more movies that could benefit from an "update" moreso than a remake... like Major League, I loved those movies as a kid. Show me some of my favorite contemporary actors having fun with a modern script on something that I enjoyed back in the day and yeah Ill watch that.
The white men cant jump remake wasnt a GREAT movie, but its not like they were remaking an absolute classic that was perfect in every way and wanted to cash in with merch, tie-ins and video games so it didnt feel like a shameless cash grab. I had fond memories of the original and I like Jack Harlow so yeah I liked it, wouldnt rave about it but its fun.
This is my stance. I love the new Dune. It's less of a remake instead of a different adaptation of the book(s), but regardless it isn't original. I generally hate the reusing of IPs just for the sake of it, but it feels right for Dune right now. For the other 90% of trailers before it that were remakes, I couldn't be bothered to care about them.
I feel like most remakes are pretty bad, if I watched the original and loved it, why would I want to watch a newer, slightly different version?
I'm a dude and I love the original Charmed and Mean Girls but didn't even bother to watch the remakes because I knew they weren't going to be as good as the originals.
Here's what people want... Good movies and good television. Yeah, originality is great, but remakes can be good too.
I liked the remake of Infernal Affairs (The Departed), Scarface, Cape Fear, Ocean's 11, The Fly, King Kong (Peter Jackson), True Grit, Judge Dread, and The Wizard of Oz (1939) was also a remake. The Fall Guy looks good too.
For TV, there's Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, Cobra Kai, Sabrina, and Wednesday, though different, could fit in there as it's still based on another property.
Yeah, I was hesitant to put Wednesday on there. I guess I was going for stories/characters we've seen before vs. something completely original. Wednesday is more like Cruella. Both good, both original, but based on previous property.
Hell some of those remarks are better than the original IMO the True Grit remake is infinitely better than the original one, mind you I dont like John Wayne movies and this aint even me being political I fucken love Clint Eastwood movies.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot kicked ass where the original was legit campy and crappy. Reboots can be okay, but for one: stop rebooting a great and successful franchise, you already are up against a very high bar.
I think it's funny you use Clint Eastwood to prove you're not politically motivated because he talked to a chair to entertain conservatives while John Wayne on the other hand was a Nazi. Like I get it, you can absolutely disagree with both it's just funny the difference in egregiousness.
Honestly sometimes we're fine with cash grabs too, aslong as they don't require much attention. For example John Wick is a really fun and easy series of films to watch but you don't need to have 100% attention throughout
I have to say, I recently realized there was a fourth and I hadn't seen the third, and I didn't care for those two. The first on was amazing. The second was good, but started introducing too much gun-magic the third and fourth had lost all the authenticity the first one was known for. The first everyone talked about how it was somewhat realistic and people moved and behaved in a believable way. In the third and fourth everyone is just running around using their jacket to block bullets while firing blindly but perfectly accurately. It got really dumb.
If you're 45, aren't you technically Gen X? My understanding is that the Millennial generation starts in the 1980s, with Gen X being between 1965 and 1980.
Generations aren't about hard lines of division. For example, if some was born in December 1979 and another in January 1980, they would have more in common than with someone born in 1975 or 1985.
I was born six months before the millennial cutoff, but I find many of my touchstones align with millennials than with Gen X and then I have some that line up with Gen X.
Ultimately, the utility of generational analysis is degraded with pieces like this. There seems to be something useful about looking at how certain aged people relate to events, but trying to ask about "How millennials are ruining the work place for Gen X" isn't a good use of that analysis.
I dunno, Ive read many different date start times. Usually i am a millennial, i think only ever saw myself at the end of the x cutoff once. There's even A goofy tiny 4 year "gen" thing i got lumped into once or twice called xennial. I dunno where i belong. Good thing it's all bullshit anyway
I'm.a 33 y/o millennial with a mortgage and shitty movies I don't want to watch. Hopefully they'll stop calling millennials "kids" by the time I retire.
Maybe it'll just morph into a pejorative like Boomer did. Like standing in for kid? Ha! More likely it's gonna be like how they did the Xers and simply not speak of us at all
Aaand the Boomer came out swinging! Bold move cotton! Listen big guy, i know it ain't your fault, it's all the lead in the air. Just try not to forget who he is when i send my kid over to mow your lawn next time, k?
Yes, Gen-X too. Unless it’s a re-telling of The Three Amigos in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with Glanton and the Judge replacing El Guapo and his German pilot lackey. In which case, I’m here for that.
Are remakes ever for a new generation? Aren't they just for the original people who liked it, and they hope a new gen will like the new content,, but they never do?
Yes, because it's well known that once a movie or series is released, it's promptly destroyed to make sure that no trace of it subsists. Which is why remakes are inevitable.
Absolutely not. This is how we got to “my James Bond is better than your James Bond”-style of thinking.
Every new gen wants their own thing. Every new gen thinks the last gen was lame. Business takes old gen shit and add new gen actor/actress/good looking person, adds old gen shit and then resells the new gen its own version. This is why every show is full of pretty people and nothing new.
Seems like one of those things everyone would say in the abstract, particularly on a survey. Then when the studios go for safe projects and the thing they remake is among someone's personal favorites they'll watch it anyway, validating the strategy.
The amount of remasters of once original successful games is increasing by the year.
There's also a pretty substantial incentive there in terms of new market access, by releasing old games on new consoles, and less work overall. A better comparison in that regard, for most movies, would probably be re-releases, with original film remastering and DVD extras.
I don't see anything wrong with serialized media, the problem is people are not also taking chances on more novel stuff. Even when it gets made. "Moon" came out fifteen years ago and I thought it was really good but damn near every time I bring it up I'm the only one who even heard about it. "Knives Out" was great, "Glass Onion" was alright, we get weird stuff like "Pig" and "The Menu" and that's all stuff with big names and decent budgets. There's tons of smaller stuff coming out too but if you don't pay attention or seek out film festivals, or know someone who does, it might as well not exist.
Are theaters just too expensive for casual audiences? Is the opportunity cost too high? Or is it just a marketing failure?
I love moon. It is a shame it is not better known, great movie.
Yes theatres are too much for a cash strapped general population. But we also see streaming get ruined all the time, the last time netflix had a show I liked (I am not OK with this) they cut it after one season, and for what? We have a situation where movies/shows should be easier then ever to make but we instead have next to nothing worthwhile out and advertised.
I also hate when they remake movies that don't work with today's production companies. Remember what they did to Old Boy? Why did they even try? And why did they think removing the big shocker (the whole point of the movie) would work?
I want remakes of badly made movies. I don't want remakes of classics that were already good. Re-screenings, perhaps. How cool would it be if your local decaplex ran Ben Hur for a weekend or something?
Boomers. Same reason why they'd much rather go to concerts for halfway decent cover bands of their childhood favorites than put any effort into discovering new music
Maybe I'm dumb but I just fail to see how moving to a streaming platform would actively prevent you from making original content. Like I get people aren't buying DVDs but they rent stuff digitally and pay to watch your stuff online. Maybe the distribution of money is way different? But I would imagine if anything it would be easier and cheaper to get stuff out in front of people's faces now. Like way easier. Instead of depending only on a theatrical release or possibly a made for tv movie or straight to dvd movie, you just get it on a streaming platform or hell even just YouTube or some random website. You can spend as much or as little as you want on it. What am I missing?
If anything I think they're just greenlighting all these remakes because it's easy money. People complain but they still pay out the ass to see it. If they didn't make money they wouldn't make them, plain and simple. I could be totally wrong here but that's just what it feels like
Streaming doesn't pay out per view, they just pay a lump sum up front to licence. If you're not already a hit, that lump sum will be low, and if millions of people stream the film it makes the studio exactly zero dollars.
American audiences are no longer the sole demographic for Hollywood. The audience is global, and high budget films are planned with that in mind. The lowest common denominator is the result.
During his Academy Award speech, Cord Jefferson (who won for the American Fiction screenplay) argued for more low-budget films at the cost of a single big-budget mess. More movies means more types of stories, allowing more niches to be filled. It also creates more industry jobs, and deepens the bench with talent development.
The best way to come up with good ideas is to figure out how to have a lot of ideas in the first place.
The movies of the late 90s are great examples of this. Dozens of different types of new stories made on what are now considered very low budgets. The problem is that without the home video and TV markets those sorts of movies don't make any money. So many 90s classics didn't make much at the box office but made bank on home video or with licensing.
Market conditions have changed, and the product needs to change with it. Just like how MTV hasn't been "music television" for a long, long time.
There's also the financial risk to be considered. A mainstream film release from 1970 might have been produced by fifty people, cast and crew combined. The crew for Barbie as per the image above was close to a thousand people. That's expensive. Have to put in twenty times the ante to be in the game, and all the payoff is in established properties that you already know have an audience? It would be foolish to do otherwise.
Like you say, if people actual did what they said they wanted, and go and take a punt on the new stuff rather than going to watch the same-old, then it would be different. But you can't complain about it when that's what you spend your money on.
Movie studios pay unimaginable money to learn what people want. It is a constant, year round expenditure for them. Their information and data suggests that while a vocal minority may be fed up with remakes, people still fervently buy them, have very short memories and seem to go bananas for any shred of nostalgia bait.
Remakes are as a result an incredibly safe bet, they are less expensive and less risk, which in financial terms is a green light. Until they aren't either of those things and they carry more risk, they will continue to be pedalled out.
False. They pay unimaginable money to find out the least amount of money required to make the most profit. Which means reducing risks on unknown properties, repeating trends that have been successful. So original stories represent unknown risk even if it’s something the public wants.
It's probably safe to say that everyone does but when the studios are putting down a lot of cash for The Next Big Thing, they tend to want a safer bet like a sequel or remake or part of a franchise. This doesn't seem to be working as well as it was and it is increasingly looking like spending smaller amounts spread around could generate a big hit too but that does need them to be able to spot good ideas and they don't have a great track record on this.
From what I understand this keeps happening because "Hollywood money" is afraid of untested "formats." Everyone wants easy money, "no one" (read: investors) wants to create art, they want an "easy" jackpot.
This kills the medium. I haven't watched a new movie in I can't even say how many years, possibly a decade.
I watch a lot, and can say there's plenty of stuff out there that's still good, whether it's arty (Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Poor Things) or fun (M3GAN, Barbie).
There's a fuckload of money being squandered on absolute bollocks though. Aquaman 2 cost over $200 million. Expend4bles cost $100 million. Both should have been scrapped before filming.
In terms of movies the worst offenders are remakes of foreign films for the US audience. Like the Oldboy remake was completely unnecessary and it changed key parts of the story. Funny Games was just a shot-for-shot remake of the original one!
Personally I'm finding the video game remakes even more egregious than the movie/tv remakes. I think it's a side effect of the modern day development costs being so out of control but as long as people keep doube - and triple - dipping on games this is going to continue.
I'll concede that the FIncher movie was a good remake that deviated enough from the source material to be worthwhile. However I guess we'll need to agree to disagree because from my point of view the good foreign remakes are greatly outnumbered by a lot of lazy ones like the Let The Right One In remake, which would be another one which I felt was creatively bankrupt.
Surely Holywood could spend their resources on producing novel content as opposed to spoonfeeding people who dislike substitles.
With that though, I'm happy with good sequels to old movies, franchises or shows. Not many actually do that, but a few gems IMHO include Rogue One and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Really though, if they're going to regurgitate old stuff why not take a movie/series that had a good premise and bad execution. It at least stands a chance of being better the second round.
Hell, you could even poke fun at the reasons the original sucked and/or make it a twist in the remake.
Really though, if they're going to regurgitate old stuff why not take a movie/series that had a good premise and bad execution.
Sometimes there are movies that have absolutely nothing going for them except the background. And I want a movie about the things going on in the background.
Ad Astra may have been utterly god awful, but I would actually enjoy a movie about the moon base.
I wouldn't mind remakes of old movies, because personally I'm not going to go watch a movie that was made in the 80s even if it is a classic or was amazing at the time.
I don't care for remakes of movies that are like 8-10 years old.
The 80s is too old? I understand not enjoying the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but what about movies like Back to the Future or Full Metal Jacket or The Princess Bride puts you off?
I'd even settle for a remake that hasn't been some before. I think we've had enough Batman do-overs. How about a remake of Stargate, or Turner and Hootch?
I do feel like there's been a small resurgence of regular non-comic and original movies lately. I'm looking forward to watching Space Man, The 3 Body Problem, and The Gentlemen on Netflix, among others.
Superhero movies are not flopping, dead on arrival capeshit schlock that no one asked for in the first place is flopping. Aquaman made 400 million dollars on a 200 million budget just in December.
The "biopic of a physicist" was made by one of the most recognizable filmmakers in Hollywood and was further propelled forward by a once in a generation hype campaign that will be impossible to repeat, although there's no doubt in my mind that studios will try nonetheless.
No. Sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. I was quite intrigued by Beetlejuice² but if giving that up is the price we have to pay, so be it.
Yeah, maybe that's cause we don't have nostalgia for any of the adapted properties they keep choosing over and over. The original star wars came out in 1970-something. Maybe some older Millennials have some nostalgia for the prequels, but even most of them tend to know that it sucks pretty hard. I feel like a lot of the millennial childhood movies, the nostalgia-bait, is gonna be stuff that are bad remakes or sequels of older movies. Gen-X had predator, Millennials had alien vs. predator: requiem. Maybe early Millennials had heathers, but mostly, Millennials have mean girls, which recently got a 1-to-1 musical remake, which wasn't that good. Last two times they've tried to adapt avatar, it's been pretty bad, as well. I just don't have supreme confidence that anyone will really understand the appeal of any of these works or realistically be able to replicate them.
I think probably a primary driver of this is that a lot of these works' appeal is rooted in their specific aesthetic, and hollywood as of late has felt very homogenized to greenscreen soundstages where everything is set in a concrete cityscape with overcast noonday lighting, because all the non-unionized CGI patsies are subject to a bunch of crunch time pressure where they just have to churn out garbage over and over. Also not helped by the amount of this which is done overseas, and can't actively take any co-ordinated input in the middle of production. Mergers, leading to ballooning budgets, leading to shittier, more controlled, more generic products. Same shit has been happening in gaming, too. Easier to sell a committee decision on a remake, adaptation, or sequel, too, something that's "proven" as a property, instead of an original IP.
That's not even really to talk on how many Zoomers probably have nostalgia for early youtube videos, and shit like that, rather than mainstream movies or franchises. They don't need to watch a remake of like, an old markiplier video, they can just tune into him doing basically the same thing he's done for the last 15 years if they want a shitty nostalgia hit. I don't need a remake of homestar runner, they're still releasing shorts that I can watch occasionally. You can watch most of the same old guys because they're still doing the same stuff they used to do. For the most part, anyways, lots of them got cancelled for being shitbags, or have had severe mental breaks. Still, point stands that, at the lower end especially, I can just go online and watch a bunch of amateur artists destroy their craft, I don't need the movies or TV for those niche hits anymore.
Everyone says they want a fully new IP and blah blah blah
But how many people then immediately jump to say that they'll wait for season 2 (or 5, because god forbid it gets cancelled) before they watch? Or that they'll wait for it to hit netflix (who actually ARE doing a lot of new IPs).
Like, I fully admit I am part of the problem. I slept on Warrior until Season 2 had aired and then realized it was literally my dream show (a show with really good choreography, amazing action actors, gratuitous nudity, a really nuanced approach to racism against Asian Americans, and all based on the philosophies of Bruce Lee) and now have to acknowledge it is never getting a Season 4
But also? You need something REAL good to get me to give a damn about a new movie. Either a ridiculously solid actor (still gonna watch the new Gareth Edwards movie even if I hear it is mid) or for it to be tied to something I know I like.
You’re right, but part of the problem is also shows getting the axe so quickly. I used to be willing to jump in on a new show and see if I’ll like it, but now with studios and streamers shitcanning things left and right, I’m way more hesitant about giving a new show time.
Doubly so with shows almost always focusing on cliffhangers and setting up the next seasons. If every season was a completely standalone thing, it wouldn't be as bad if they were getting axed. But I don't want to watch a show knowing there's a 90% chance none of the interesting questions will ever get answered.
how many people then immediately jump to say that they’ll wait for season 2 (or 5, because god forbid it gets cancelled) before they watch?
I never do that, and anyone who does is really overthinking how the TV box works. You just watch the shit if you think it's interesting and you feel like it. There's no "investment" there to worry about. If the show gets cancelled, then that sucks, but it was just a TV show. There are many others to move on to for your time wastage.
Out of curiosity what do you feel when you finish a book?
You just watch the shit if you think it’s interesting and you feel like it. There’s no “investment” there to worry about.
There absolutely is an emotional investment in a show that I find interesting. If that show ends before it completes its story it does annoy me and is a drag on starting something new.
Edit: Wah wah boo hoo your generation is middle aged and buying stuff little old you doesn't like because you're extra special. Has no baring on reality. Gen X is America's largest consumer group. Get over it.