To All the Stories I Loved Before: a Lament About Remakes, Cash-ins, And Reboots

I am…..tired.

Fatigued.

Weary.

I’m tired of stories I care about—stories about friendship, perseverance, love, miracles—being plundered like a bloated corpse on the battlefield.

It’s no secret among my social circles that I have a vehement hatred against remakes. Most people don’t like them, they think they are lazy and pointless, but I have transcended this faze.

I absolutely, positively despise them to the point where I honestly think Hollywood should shut down for the next 10 years, if not indefinitely.

Think about it: Would any of our lives truly be that much worse if Hollywood said, “you know what? No new movies. We’re packing it in.”

Hell, you could make the argument they aren’t making new movies now, so what’s the difference anyway?

Movie studios : How do we make more money?

Producers:

Everything is a remake. A “reimagining.”

A reboot.

In 2022, Cheaper by the Dozen, is getting its second remake. Father of the Bride is being remade a third time. Matilda is getting redone as well and is supposed to star Emma Thompson.

I’m not even factoring in all the continuations, sequels, and prequels of old IPs from horror, to comedy, to tragedy, it never stops.

What makes them so bad is most of these movies don’t make any attempt to capture the ethos of the originals. They don’t know, or care, what made the ones that came before so great. What’s worse is they try to “update” them for a modern audience, a phrase I’ve come to learn means “make them worse.”

They “fix” characters by making them overpowered as hell and take away everything that made them likable.

Or they will insert a bunch of politics without keeping it fair and nuanced. Instead of just showing us a scene and allowing the moment to carry its own weight, it makes the characters explain what we are supposed to understand and feel like we—the audience—are a bunch of dumb children.

I just don’t understand why, with so many creative voices in the world, you need to keep digging up these corpses and parading them around. Just come up with something new for once in your life. Surely there is a plucky twenty-something living in their car with good ideas. Provided they haven’t moved to Texas because they can’t pay your ridiculously high taxes.

The stories of my childhood hold a tender place in my heart, so watching them being bastardized somewhat taints the memory I had of them.

Maybe that’s the point. It may sound ridiculous, but in this world that is becoming progressively more crazy and tyrannical, maybe they want to take everything that was valuable to us storytelling wise and make it suck.

Maybe they want us to feel like nothing is important.

That all will be torn asunder in the wake of the New World Order.

Or, I don’t know, maybe this just means we should read more books.

Then again, those will just get turned into shitty movies anyway, so why bother?

Who knows? Maybe eventually people will stop falling for this crap and the movie industry will take enough of a financial hit that they will realize it’s not worth it to try to revitalize what didn’t need to be revitalized in the first place.

I’m just trying to stay positive.