The Movies They Aren't Remaking

Hollywood often seems remake-mad--because it is remake-mad. Thus are many of its remakes not only entirely pointless from an artistic perspective, but from a commercial one as well, with the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer exemplary. Yet it seems only fair to say that even in its remake addiction Hollywood has not been wholly insensible to the limits of what it can sell. If 2025's I Know What You Did Last Summer was a dubious prospect, it was still broadly the case that it was a relatively low-stakes bet (the production budget was reported as being a "mere" $18 million), which may have seemed plausible on the basis of the relatively good track record of relatively low-cost horror movies for relative profitability, with this one helped by name recognition and perhaps also '90s nostalgia (pop culturally a whimper next to the bang made by '80s nostalgia earlier in the century, but all the same, seemingly something they could work with).

At the same time I have been struck by the films of yesteryear of whose remaking we hear not a breath. If the high price tag and tough sell to domestic audiences have not wholly inhibited Hollywood in regard to the remarking of period pieces, musicals, and movies that are both (thus did the studios greenlight 2016's Ben-Hur, and 2021's West Side Story), it is still the case that Hollywood is less ardent about remaking such movies than it is films in, for example, the sci-fi action genre--perhaps the more in as the politics of the time have an inhibiting effect on do-overs of great hits of yesteryear. Certainly one imagines the sneering that would be directed at South Pacific from certain quarters in light of its number "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," all as the fact that the opinions of those who are outraged by criticism of fascism or the presentation of the Nazis as bad guys count for more than they did just a few years ago is not at all encouraging for any remake of The Sound of Music. Meanwhile, if for all that Hollywood's excitement about LGTBQ+-relevant projects remains robust, that is nowhere near enough to entice it to a remake of From Here to Eternity, given the source material's unflattering portrait of life in the American armed forces--and that in the era of the celebrated "Greatest Generation" on the eve of its fighting "the good war." Meanwhile in a lighter vein one may be struck by how Hollywood's propensity for remaking romantic comedies has also declined. Thus where in the '80s we saw a new version of His Girl Friday for the era of television news (and the Drug War) in Switching Channels, and the '90s had do-overs of such films as Sabrina and The Shop Around the Corner, one would be hard-pressed to find anything comparable in its recent output of major feature films made for theatrical release. The genre in particular seems an awkward one for a Hollywood that seems content to leave such fare to home entertainment given not only the romantic comedy's limitations as a moneymaker (one doesn't get sequels and merchandising here, while for a multitude of reasons the form doesn't travel the way big action movies do), but its awkwardness for an industry that can, however inconsistently, be as piously woke regarding gender as it can be ultra-reactionary and bigoted on a great many matters of race--and still more, class--all as the sensibility that could "get it right" just isn't there. (How far we are from the age of Howard Hawks, and Billy Wilder, and Ernst Lubitsch, the old "Lubitsch touch" not even to be dreamed of in our era of music video makers who mistake themselves for auteurs, and pseudo-mature edgelord indie directors! How far we already were in the day of the remakes that did get made!) Indeed, in considering these movies from the 1960s, the 1950s, the 1940s, it also seems to me that the passage of time has not only meant increasing difficulty in adapting the classics for what we sometimes euphemistically call "a contemporary audience" given changes in what the cultural gatekeepers consider acceptable, but also the plain and simple fact that with a crass capitalization on name recognition a key rationale for the strategy the fact that the "contemporary audience," to which the screen classics of that era are a closed book, doesn't know the names deprives the remakes of their hook. In considering all this too it also seems worth remarking that in its relentless remaking of past hits this leaves Hollywood drawing upon a narrower stock of source material--and in the process only makes the tendency the more obvious and grating.