There is no practice in this industry that I find more irritating, more hypocritical and more disingenuous than the constant bleating by the blogging community about the evils of remakes. “When will the madness end?!?” they cry. Yeah! Right? When will Hollywood get around to making original films again instead of remake after remake in what Drew McWeeny recently coined as "karaoke culture"? My guess? When the bloggers of the world stop providing Hollywood with millions upon millions of dollars in free advertising.
If there is any reason we’ve been inundated with more and more remakes, I believe it is this: the blogs write about them ceaselessly. The hardest part of selling movies isn’t making good ones, it is getting people to show up at them – which means making people aware that they exist. Recently, a site run by a buddy of mine wrote up a story talking about an unmade remake purchased at a Cannes pre-sale. While dozens of films were no doubt bought and sold before Cannes officially opened, this was the one story the site ran about them. Why? Because it was a remake of a film he was familiar with. And like it or not, remakes bring reads.
The web is driven by click culture. We make our money by having you click on stories. Whether you read the story or not is sometimes immaterial. We just need you to click it and see the advertising. When a website posts a story on a film announced by a director you’ve never heard of (most likely a commercial director) on an unknown topic, with a working title and the name of an attached screenwriter and a producer you should have heard of but don’t remember, there’s a good chance that you don’t care. So what, right? You have no idea what that is or what it will look like and you won't click the story. And unless a big name gets attached and some production photos get sent around, there’s a good chance you won’t hear about it again until it is set to come out – if at all.
But a remake is different. You know what the original film looked like. You know what that kind of movie is supposed to look like in this day and age. And like it or loathe it, the idea of it will get you to click the story to find out the details. While almost every blogger I know opines constantly about the steady stream of remakes, they are also the first to write up a story of their opinion on the announcement of the remake, the casting of the remake, the first stills of the remake, the marketing of the remake and the release strategy and opening weekend of the remake – both pre- and post-coverage. It is the golden goose of marketing. If you want to make a modestly budgeted film that gets talked about incessantly by those blogs that cater directly to alpha filmgoers, you make a remake. They can’t keep themselves from talking about it.
As much as the blogs hated the idea of A Nightmare on Elm Street (until Jackie Earle Haley was aboard) and then hated the film when they reviewed it, they covered every single casting announcement and press release that came out of that thing. And guess which film made its production budget back off of its domestic opening weekend gross, shattering the opening weekend cume of every previous incarnation with Elm Street in the title?
If you stop talking about these films, you cut down on the awareness of these films; if you cut down the awareness of these films, you cut down the interest in these films; if you cut down interest in these films, you cut down the box office of these films; if you cut down the box office of these films, they will stop making them. It’s that simple. The blogs are where people are getting their movie news now. It’s okay to dislike remakes, but it is disingenuous to pay your bills with remake clicks with one hand while typing up how much you hate remakes with the other.
Stop writing about them or stop whining. It really is that simple.