Sunday, January 08, 2012

Movie reboots.............are filmmakers getting lazy?

I consider myself somewhat of a movie buff.
I've watched all sorts of different genre from silent movies all the way up to Twilight (what can i say, it was a date thing).

And from the big screen to television I've become to equate certain characters with the actors/actresses that have portrayed them.
Charlton Heston will forever remain in my memory as Moses just as whenever I imagine 'that guy in the red cape and blue tights, Christopher Reeve will ALWAYS be Superman.

But in the last few years or so, a lazy trend is taking place that wants to take our most sacred memories and replace them with new faces. It's called the franchise reboot.

When he first made the jump from comic book form to the big screen, The Punisher was brought to life by Dolph Lundgren in 1989. It was a decent enough film, recounting how Frank Castle, a police officer who watches his wife and child murdered, then shot and left for dead himself, becomes the stone-cold vigilante we all have come to know and love.
But then in 2004 along comes Thomas Jane in a retelling of that story.
Again, not a bad flick, but when Punisher:War Zone is released in 2008, an actor by the name of Ray Stevenson is cast to portray Frank Castle/The Punisher.

I never saw this movie, and after seeing the previews, I had no desire to.
Only one other time did a franchise change the main actor to portray a single character and I watched with an open mind each time. That's only because I am a HUGE Batman fan and in each incarnation of Bruce Wayne/Batman, I accepted a different leading man in that role.

But fast forward to 2012.
This year promises to reboot Superman, Spiderman and even Jason Bourne. And to make matters worse, there are talks of remaking The Evil Dead, RoboCop, Dirty Dancing, and even Great Expectations.

Each of these movies hold certain memories for each of us but the biggest memory is the actor/actress that portrayed the main character.

It's easy to associate characters with faces, but filmmakers have become lazy in coming up with new stories that the trend seems to be retelling of old ones and THIS movie goer doesn't want all of those memories replaced with someone else's face.

1 comment:

Paulius said...

I thinks its more to do with finance than laziness. There are a million aspiring screenwriters with new deas, but it comes down to one thing: Why risk millions of dollars in a brand new, unproven IP, when you can invest your money in a movie that already has a massive fan base?

Its creatively bankrupt, but, quite simply, you make far more money churning out sequels and reboots (or blatantly ripping something off) than you do being original... And thats what hollywood's about