If you’ve been looking ahead to this year’s movie offerings, well, you’ve got to admit that the pickins appear to be pretty slim. We’ve got Men In Black (they’re up to what, number 14 now?), a new Spider-Man reboot, oh, and let’s not forget the latest Snow White redux (that makes two this year … or is it three?).
On top of that, you may have also heard that the Hollywood machine is cranking out a series of Paul Verhoeven remakes over the next couple years. He’s the guy who made such fare as RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall—all of which are getting a new face, starting with Recall (pictured) releasing this summer.
If you’ve never seen any of those pics, they’re all sci-fi future imaginings. RoboCop is the story of a Detroit detective who’s brutally murdered and then resurrected as a half man/half robot lawman. Starship Troopers follows a bunch of high school pals as they’re sucked into the service by military propaganda and sent off to battle giant insects. And Total Recall is an old Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that focuses on a guy who’s bored with his life and gets an “I’m a Spy” memory implant that goes terribly wrong.
They’re all creative ideas, for sure (two of them based on writings from sci-fi masters Robert A Heinlein and Philip K. Dick), but they’ve all got their own sets of messy problems. And they’ll likely get even messier with the new remakes, since their makers want them to be “grittier” than the originals. Not sure how they’ll make the splattering RoboCop much grittier.
On top of all that, there’s the consideration that these originals aren’t all that old. What’s to draw viewers into the theater—after producers have spent tens of millions on a redo—when they can pop the old blu-ray of Arnold and his backside-kicking ways in the video player?
I think we just need to start a petition. Just pass it around and get a few million signatures. Hollywood may be creatively bankrupt, but there needs to be an expiration date or something on any old classic movie before it can be dropped into the remakeit machine. Say 30 or 40 years? And an even longer expiration date for the not-so-classic ones. Maybe a hundred. I mean, do we really need to see a remake of Catwoman or Battlefield Earth or (shudder) Jack and Jill anytime within the next century or two?
After that, maybe we can work on a petition concerning sequels.
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