A sinister plague has taken over the film industry and consumers are continuing to suffer.
This outbreak works similar to that of the future zombie apocalypse. The “disease” is bringing dead films back to life as terrible reincarnations of their former selves. Well, sort of.
The epidemic is what I like to call: Movie reboots or remakes. Yes, we audiences of this modern and contemporary age of film are suffering from it.
It seems now that a year cannot go by without at least one reincarnation of a film being released. From Halloween to Ocean’s Eleven, reboots and remakes are growing in numbers and they are hurting the creativity of film making as whole.
From a financial standpoint, movie reboots are the safest bet for film studios and it makes sense why so many are being made. A film executive making the decision on which film to give out a budget for will choose an established franchise over an original idea almost every time. From the executive’s view , it makes sense. He knows he is taking a risk with a brand new project because it will require more marketing to establish a fan base.
The film industry has become too much of a business and it has quit caring as much about art as it does about money. Movie studios are showing their true colors when they don’t have the guts to put financial backing behind a new idea. Art should never become about what project is going to pad the most pockets.
The worst part about these remakes is that they are being made for their name and the ease of convincing people to come see it. By using this business mentality, naturally, the quality of the film being made goes down. As long as the film has a title that people have heard before and want to see again then the quality of the film doesn’t matter to studios because money is being made regardless.
Not every remake turns out to necessarily be a bad movie, but the bad far outweigh the good. Take the movie True Grit for example. It’s a remake of the 1969 film that gave John Wayne his Oscar. True Grit turned out to be a great movie, which is a rarity for reincarnated films. This does not redeem the idea of remakes, however.
Sure, True Grit may be a rare exception to the usual garbage that comes with reboots but it still isn’t an original idea. Film making is an art and art should always be about moving forward and discovering something new and original. No one wants to see someone paint a duplicate of the Mona Lisa, they want to see a painting that becomes the next Mona Lisa!
I would go as far to say that I would prefer that no remake had ever been made and that they all were replaced with new and original ideas. Filmmakers should be striving to create the next great story instead of basing their work off of someone else’s. If no remakes existed, there would be hundreds more of original films and every time you watched a movie you would know that no one has made it before.
Until humanity finds a cure to this disease plaguing the movie industry, the rest of us will have to be stuck watching the new upcoming reboot of the Spiderman franchise. Yes, they are seriously already remaking it.