To remake or not to remake? The business of rebooting old films
Don’t be afraid, owners of intellectual property. Remakes are a win-win situation for the creators of cult film classics says producer Enzo Tedeschi.
Remakes. They’re everywhere. They’re a constant and no intellectual property is safe. Robocop, Dirty Dancing, Total Recall, Mad Max, even Hitchcock’s The Birds hasn’t escaped the talons of the remake or reboot.
As a film buff, I pitch my tent firmly in the camp of fans who see their much-loved movies as sacred ground. After all, did Spiderman honestly need a reboot just five years after its last sequel?
And will it really be Total Recall without Arnie, or Mad Max without Mel?
The original Charles Dickens literary works seem to crossover into Any-media effortlessly and still seem new. Look at all the versions/adaptions of Great Expectations for example. You could watch/listen to them all back to back without getting tired of or it losing admiration for the original.
Remakes are nothing new. If you look up old films on IMDB, you will often find that they were remade several times, within a few years. It seems that they were considered more like theatre productions than one-offs.
And even those ‘originals’ are often based on stories dating back hundreds, even thousands of years.