Every time a remake tanks, there’s always the hope that the reboot conveyor belt will eventually stop. Yet even with remakes like RoboCop, Endless Love and Total Recall not doing well, there’s still remakes being announced all the time, including the inevitable, Gilligan’s Island: The Movie.
So why does this still go on? Vulture brought up some good points to consider. Remakes started happening in the new millennium because people know the title, but many were too lazy to seek out the original. As Vulture points out, remakes look good to shareholders on paper. The studios are very corporate now, and they understand graphs, columns and charts, not art. If it was a hit before, it could be a hit again, like covering a song.
It’s also less risky to back a remake instead of an original film. Not to mention remakes get more press. Look at how much we covered all these remakes on TGD, and whatever anyone writes, there’s many who believe there’s no such thing as bad publicity. (Although, it hasn’t helped any of the remakes we mentioned above.)
Vulture lastly pointed out that some remakes actually do work, Scarface certainly comes to mind, and reboots have done some franchises very well, like the Christopher Nolan Batmans for example. Some feel there are no original stories, it’s how you do them, and if the remakes and reboots have to keep on coming, we wish the filmmakers would try a lot harder to reinvent these movies instead of just repeating them.
