Finalist in the 2024 NYT Open Letter Contest
Refresh to Refresh: What HollyWood Can do to Stop Redoing The Past
To Studio Executives Whom This May Concern,
We’ve all been there. You’re watching a film or with bated breath. The feelings of shock, disappointment, and anger, as you watch the butchering of a beloved story. I’m talking about remakes.
Remakes are films or TV shows that take an existing work and remake it, with the same elements of the original, and recently, studios have been producing more and more of them. Last year, saw the releases of Netflix’s live-action “One Piece” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, HBO Max’s “Velma”, and Amazon Prime’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”. Not to mention all of Disney’s live-action remakes.
These remakes expose new audiences to old films, allow studios to fix the mistakes of the original, and are beloved by all.
Not in the slighest.
If you look at most remakes, they aren’t made because the originals were bad. They’re made because the originals were beloved and enjoyed by many, and studios remake them in the hope of capitalizing on the original’s success. They often change nothing from the originals or change things for the worse, coming across as “uncanny” and “lifeless” as The New York Times writer Elizabeth Nelson puts it. They don’t capture the same highs as the originals and aren’t great introductions to those original stories.
Let’s put it this way. Would you should your friend HBO Max’s “Velma” as an introduction to Scooby-Doo when most audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes describe it as terrible?
I don’t think so.
Speaking of which, most original audiences don’t take kindly to these remakes. A survey headed by James Barnes with the company Verve Search found that 90% of the time remakes had lower IMDB scores than their originals. Films such as the liver-action “Aladdin” and “Dumbo”, “House on Sorority Road”, and “Cabin Fever” experienced drops in critic and audience ratings.
So what are studios supposed to make?
As writer/director Cord Jefferson affirmed in his 2024 Oscar Acceptance speech, Hollywood can try to make 20 $10 million movies instead of one big $200 million one.
These days, many remakes have high budgets. Disney’s live-action remakes, for instance, have budgets upward of $100 million. Rather than making one $150 million remake, spread that money across multiple original films, creating new stories that could become beloved in their own right.
Disney’s 1989 “The Little Mermaid” was an original film with a budget of only $40 million. It was an animated musical, first of its kind, paving the way for what would later become the Disney Renaissance. Studios didn’t get here by redoing the same thing. They got here because they took risks. And now it’s time for them to start doing that again.
Sincerely,
Ishaan
Ishaan Reddy 