This past weekend’s “Ghostbusters” was billed by many as a reboot, and in some ways that’s fair — the film discards the continuity of earlier films in the franchise and starts again from scratch, which is more or less the definition of a reboot. But we’d argue that it’s closer to a remake in many ways. It has the same basic set-up; characters who, while they’ve switched genders, follow a rough template of the ones who came before; and most of the same story beats (paranormal activity is discovered to be real, a ragtag group of ghost hunters establish themselves, battle various ghosts, leading to giant spectacular climax).
As has been noted many times before, Hollywood is increasingly reliant on films based on pre-existing IP or source material, as (the theory goes) it’s easy to market a film if people are already aware of the title. Remakes are just one example of this, but they’re becoming increasingly common: If it worked before, it’ll work again, executives believe. Even better, a remake normally derives from a property that’s already in a studio library, so they don’t even have to pay any extra for them. Anecdotally, a screenwriter friend had a meeting recently at a major studio, where an executive told him that all they wanted to produce right now were remakes of the studio’s movies from the 1980s and 1990s.
“Ghostbusters” is an exception among most remakes, in that it has mostly decent reviews and has done ok at the box office (though it may yet struggle to turn a profit, given its cost and the likelihood that it won’t do that well internationally). Because when you look at the recent history of the remake and really break it down, it becomes increasingly hard to justify Hollywood’s love for them as a so-called “safe bet.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a remake. A good story endures for a reason: It’s capable of resonating with different generations of audiences. Hitchcock remade his own movies, as did Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu and Michael Mann. And there have been some great ones, from “A Fistful Of Dollars” to “The Thing,” from “Scarface” to “The Departed”: movies that saw great filmmakers take great source material and elevate it into something arguably even better, with real vision and ingenuity.
These are, unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule. Most of the remakes we see, particularly of late, stink of a certain kind of cynicism, of jumping on what’s hoped to be a brand name (or, almost as often, a great story by a foreign-language filmmaker that can be recycled) in the hope of making a fast buck. Some are simply slavish retells of the original (famously, the sole screenplay credit for the remake of “The Omen” went to original writer David Seltzer, who did no new work on the movie, while Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho” was deliberately a shot-for-shot retell of Hitchcock’s film), while others take the basic premise and little else. But worryingly few seem to be born of love.
And their critical reception reflects that. In a highly unscientific study, we looked at 110 of the most prominent remakes released in the last 20 years, ranging from the “Psycho” remake to the recent “Point Break” re-do (check for the full list at the end). Their average Rotten Tomatoes score (a flawed maxim by which to judge these things, but as good a one as we have) turns out to be just 48.27%. And worse, only 28% of these recent theatrically released remakes were certified “fresh” by the site, by having 60% or more of their reviews being positive in some way or another.
This perhaps won’t shock you, given that remakes in the time period we’re talking about include “Annie” (27% positive), “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (21% positive), “Endless Love” (15% positive), “Fantastic Four” (9%) and “Point Break” (9%), to name but a few. And whether you saw them or not, you probably gathered that they stunk. And perhaps that wouldn’t have mattered to a studio at one point, who believed movies are inherently critic-proof, so long as you have a familiar name to tag on it.
But at a time when there’s more and more competition from different entertainment mediums than ever before, audiences do seem to be paying attention to reviews, or at least to the consensus of reviews on a Rotten Tomatoes or a Metacritic: This year, only two of the top 10 grossers were poorly reviewed (“Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” and “X-Men: Apocalypse”); and last year, only five of the top 20 (“Minions,” “Home,” “Hotel Transylvania,” “Fifty Shades Of Grey” and “San Andreas”). And the general poorly received nature of remakes should be giving studios pause before they greenlight another one.
But not as much pause as they should get from looking at the financial figures alone. Let’s assume that to turn a profit on a movie, you have to make twice your budget at the box office. And let’s assume that the publicly stated budgets of the 110 remakes we looked at are correct (they’re almost certainly understated on the whole, but we’ll give them this much). That means that only 49 of the 110 — 40% of the total — were profitable. And it gets worse when you consider that of the films that turned a profit, 16 were low-budget horror remakes, the easiest of the genres to make money from, because they can be made and marketed for relatively little money.
Again, this is an unscientific process, and again, you have the films that buck the trend, some of which did so massively, like “The Jungle Book,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Clash Of The Titans,” or “Alice In Wonderland” (though two of these are based on popular books, rather than being a pure remake, and the latter two also spawned sequels that flopped hugely, in large part because their predecessors were so cruelly disliked).