Advice for Hollywood

Stop remaking films. Start re-releasing them.

How's that sound? I mean, there are a few notable exceptions to this rule. If Peter Jackson wants to remake King Kong, fine. Martin Scorsese wants to remake Cape Fear, more power to him. Sergio Leone wants to remake Yojimbo and Sanjuro into westerns, awesome. But there is no reason that we need to be treated with all of the remakes to movies that didn't need to be remade.

The most recent example of films that could have been re-released instead of remade that has pissed me off the most was the Steve Martin Pink Panther movie. Blake Edwards films stand up on their own still. Why not spend $1 million plus prints advertising a re-release instead of paying Steve Martin ten times that to shit on Peter Sellers' grave. I'd pay $6 plus popcorn to see A Shot in the Dark in the theatre. Steve Martin's remake is hard for me to justify seeing for free at the discount movie theatre I moonlight at.

People see re-releases. People like going to the movies. People like taking their kids to movies they enjoyed themselves as kids. My parents used to be thrilled to take us to see the old re-issues that Disney used to do in the eighties. I'd love to take my son to see a real Pink Panther movie. I'd also kill to see some more older movies.

Remember Stanley Donen's "Charade" with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn? Of course you do. That movie is amazing and it still holds up. Which would you rather go to see at the theatre? The original? Or the Jonathan Demme remake with Mark Wahlberg reprising Cary Grants role? I'm going to bet you'd have gone to see the original and not the remake. Why would you bother with a sequel to Oceans 11 when most people haven't seen the classic Rat Pack original? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to re-issue it than blow $50 million on the cast of a new one.

My point is, if you're going to spend effort thinking about all of these classic old movies, the effort would be better spent just re-releasing them. Let people making films make original films. Maybe a few of them might be good.