If You Film It They Will Come

No matter what your opinion is on the validity of Global Warming, you can’t deny that recycling is big business these days. Everywhere you look, more and more homes and businesses are separating cardboard and glass, paper and plastic. All so that it can be taken, broken down and turned into something new. Each time this happens, manufacturers polish up the goods, make them shine and tell you that the “new” product contains a certain percentage of recycled material so that no one will complain about a lack of quality whether it’s perceived or whether it’s real. Recycled batteries, ink cartridges and plastic bottles are all a part of our every day life now. But the thing is… so are movies.

It’d be all too easy for me to say that there are no new ideas left in the movie making industry, and there are days when it feels like that’s the case. But the plain and simple truth is that studios follow the money and people like to spend money on what’s familiar rather than what’s original.

Even in the world of movies, brand loyalty is a powerful tool. It’s almost a guarantee for a sure fire hit if you revamp an old franchise. Whether the success is financial or artistic is up for debate. Every time that we hear of a plan to unleash a brand new Predator or Alien or Bond or Batman franchise on the world, phrases like “reboot” and “reimagining” are bandied about by studios partly to cash in on the pre-built loyalty that the brand has and partly so that the ardent online fans of the original franchise or movie will start to react.

Each and every time a reboot or reimagining is announced and details are leaked, there’s a group of people somewhere who will be outraged by the news and snap into action to protest or petition against it. But let’s face it, it’s not a bad situation for the studios to be in even if the fans do protest and organise online petitions. Bad publicity is free publicity. And any free publicity is good publicity.

“Reboot” and “reimagining” are words that we’ve been taught to use when we’re describing old-made-new-again movies. They sound a lot better than saying “money for old rope”. But on the other side of that coin, we’ve also been taught to hide the truth on the rare occasion that an original idea is presented to us. Whether it’s because of a lack of advertising dollars, or because it’s the actual truth I can’t say but how many times in the past few years have you heard a movie described as a “word of mouth” movie?

A list of my favourite movies would without doubt include The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, Serenity, The Princess Bride, The Fountain, The Dark Knight and Clerks II. Out of that list, the only movie that wasn’t based on either a novel or comic book or wasn’t a sequel to another movie, a continuation of a TV series or a reboot of an existing franchise is The Fountain. The Fountain is, in most every way imaginable, an original movie. It has a superb cast and a fantastic director. What it didn’t have was a saleable premise, an established name or an Irish general cinema release. Possibly, the film is so original that the cinemas in Ireland couldn’t handle it, or thought that the audiences couldn’t. Like a lot of people, I only heard about this movie through word of mouth and only found it by hunting it down in my local DVD store.

Think of it as six degrees of separation between you and an original idea, where each degree is an additional battle that you and the idea have to fight in order to find each other. Sometimes that battle is to get that idea accepted and produced, sometimes the battle is to find cinemas willing to take a chance on screening the production. It’s just made harder by the fact that by virtue of the fact that if the idea is original, you may not recognise it when you see it. New ideas are usually buried at the bottom of whatever pile they’re in, whether that be a pile of scripts on a desk or a list of movies in a Cineplex.

Pick any two Adam Sandler movies at random and there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll see him give pretty much the same performance in both movies. Adam Sandler’s actually not a terrible actor, and he’s no idiot. He knows full well that people want Adam Sandler to play the same type of character over and over again in lowest common denominator movies and usually have the emotional resolution of the movie on some form of sports field. Adam Sandler can give a good original performance when called upon to, Punch Drunk Love and Funny People have shown us this much. But he knows that more people will pay to see him give them what they know and what they expect than if he tries for originality.

Getting a remake or reboot or sequel or prequel to our cinema screens does legitimately take a lot of effort. It’s not an easy thing to do by any stretch of the imagination. Any movie of that type has to attract new viewers as well as keep the pre-existing fans happy, or at the very least, keep them interested. But the main goal seems to be to attract as many viewers as possible, even if it means watering down what was great about the original movies. John McClane was allowed to shoot a helicopter with a car in Die Hard 4.0, but he wasn’t allowed to use his catchphrase for fear that the younger members of the audience might be offended. If that practice was extended, Rocky wouldn’t be allowed run up the steps in the obligatory training montage for fear that it might offend people who can’t run.

Relaunching a franchise usually having to make a movie-by-committee and that means making concessions.

There’s no denying that I’m looking forward to the A-Team movie, based on the TV series of the same name, or to Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, based on… Wall Street. But more than anything, what I want is to walk into a cinema and be totally surprised by what’s presented to me, and surprised to see that the screening is packed to capacity by people who are willing to seek out and support an original idea.

Remakes, reboots and adaptations have been around since the early days of cinema and they’re not going away any time soon. They’re an important part of the movie industry, and sometimes a necessary evil, Chris Nolan’s Batman reboot gave him the clout to bring Inception to our cinemas in the very near future. Original thought and original movies are out there, waiting to be noticed. They’re usually not as flashy as the recycled movies but they might just be better for the planet.

– Simon Fitzgerald

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