MGM Seeks Director For WarGames Remake

[otakon17]

What next to remake? The Stuff? Gremlins? Other once popular or well known movies?

They ARE remaking Gremlins... (and Poltergeist + Suspiria and Goonies :/).

Wait, wait WAIT. They're REMAKING Gremlins, Poltergeist and The Goonies?! The hell is this, those movies were pure '80's you can't catch that lightning in a jar, the hell.

As for a Wargames remake, it can work fine. War on terror, online gaming, hell it has more to go with now than it did before. Too bad we won't get to see a cool remote-controlled flying dinosaur however.

 

[synobal]

oh god, this won't be good at all. Nope not good at all.

 

[Nowhere Man]

It deeply saddens me to think that the current generations will probably be the first to see the same films rehashed twice, maybe three times within their life spans.

They really won't. Titanic, Dracula, Frankenstein; people have been repeatedly remaking the same films for as long as films have existed. Maybe some of those can be discounted because they're making a film based on the same thing rather than explicitly remaking the same film, but then you have things like King Kong which have had multiple remakes. Godzilla, in the same way as King Kong, has at least two actual remakes on top of all the sequels. Night of the Living dead, remade twice. How many times has The Poseidon Adventure been done now? Robin Hood? King Arthur? Shakespeare? Just about any Greek or Biblical mythology?

Constantly remaking shittier versions of old films may be annoying, but it's not in any way a new trend. The first generation to see the same films rehashed multiple times was my great grandparents. The first generation to see the same story rehashed multiple times was whichever generation hundreds of thousands of years ago first invented stories.

Isn't there more then one version of the Wizard of Oz too? I see and agree with your point, it just seems the reboot/remakes are happening quicker and quicker. Could be just my perception though.

Also I just realized I used a bad example in referencing Moore's law, but you all get the point I'm trying to make.

 

[PlasmaCow]

I can see it now, the world hangs in the balance over how accurately some dumb teen can fling an AngryBird.

 

[jrralls]

Question: Is there actually two nations on earth at this moment in time that is currently locked in a cold war with the threat of nuclear war?

India and Pakistan. They;

1) Are both nuclear powers.
2) Have fought multiple wars with the lifetimes of its rulers (the most recent fight in 1999 cost over 2,000 lives)
3) Have a disputed borders.
4) Regard each other as their biggest enemy.
5) Politicans are more likely to get elected (in India) or selected (in Pakistan) if they are tough on the other country

Plus Pakistan has had a series of bad governments and radical Islam is quite strong in that country so if the loonies ever come up on top they could make some bad benefit/risk decisions.

Mind you, I really doubt Hollywood would ever make a movie, let alone War Games, about it.

It would be an interesting setting though. You could have some American exchange student hack into India's KARTIKEYA system (they'd hardly call theirs Joshua) and have the added bonus of setting the movie in an exotic land with some fish-out-of-water elements. Still Hollywood might not think that India and Pakistan loosing a few hundred million was high enough stakes so I doubt they'll do anything interesting like that.

 

[Atmos Duality]

The Hollywood nostalgia-grinder continues to find new (or rather old) properties to reprocess into modern paste.
Why not? Market studies show that there's no threat of mass-market rejection when it all tastes the same, right?

 

[Kahani]

Isn't there more then one version of the Wizard of Oz too? I see and agree with your point, it just seems the reboot/remakes are happening quicker and quicker. Could be just my perception though.

It's certainly possible it happens quicker now, but I think the existence of both the internet and the prevalence of video recording in general are big problems for perception. Note the opening line of the article - "Pop-cultural "turnover" moves so fast now that every single dubious classic of the 80s and 90s is going to be remade in the near future." That's all very well, but the '80s were 30 years ago now. Is it really reasonable to complain that turnover is fast when you're talking about things made before many of us were even born being remade? The problem is rather that it doesn't feel that long ago because we can watch things made 30 years ago as easily as if they were made yesterday. Often even more easily in fact.

In contrast, and sticking with a previous example, Titanic had it's first remake made only months after the first film was released, with both being released the same year the accident actually happened. But if you didn't see them when they were in the cinema, that was pretty much it. And one of them had all known copies destroyed in a fire a couple of years later and has therefore never been seen since. Someone watching the 1929 remake would not have had any chance to see the previous films since they were released nearly 20 years earlier, so would presumably not perceive any issue with having a remake made so soon. Yet we're now complaining about there being a gap twice as big between the original and remakes. The remakes aren't necessarily coming any faster, it just seems that way because we have so much more access to older products.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that remakes aren't happening faster as well, it's just that there are good reasons to expect us to perceive it that way even if they aren't, so merely having that perception doesn't really tell us anything. It would be quite interesting see the actual data on remakes throughout the history of Hollywood, but that would be a hell of a lot of work and I'm not even sure where'd you'd get a lot of the information needed.