CLASH OF THE TITANS!!!

[Beltmann]

Wow.. This must mean that Hollywood is hurting for new ideas.

Thing is, it's not really a new phenomenon. In the big studio days--especially the Thirties and Forties--quickie remakes were actually far more common than even today (and they didn't wait 20 years before tackling a property over and over again). Directors were under contract, and sometimes the same man was assigned to make the same movie twice just a few years apart. (Heck, even Cecil B. DeMille made The Ten Commandments twice--once as a silent movie, once as a color spectacle.) Few of these churned-out pictures are remembered today, which is why it feels like the remake craze is unique to contemporary Hollywood. We didn't live through all the lousy chaff of the Forties, so it's easy to forget that they had a pretty large share of crapola, too.

[u2roolz]

Thing is, it's not really a new phenomenon. In the big studio days--especially the Thirties and Forties--quickie remakes were actually far more common than even today (and they didn't wait 20 years before tackling a property over and over again). Directors were under contract, and sometimes the same man was assigned to make the same movie twice just a few years apart. (Heck, even Cecil B. DeMille made The Ten Commandments twice--once as a silent movie, once as a color spectacle.) Few of these churned-out pictures are remembered today, which is why it feels like the remake craze is unique to contemporary Hollywood. We didn't live through all the lousy chaff of the Forties, so it's easy to forget that they had a pretty large share of crapola, too.

 

Yeah, this is most notable to me via my love of The Three Stooges.

Columbia Pictures rehashed, regurgitated, and remade shorts quite often to the Stooges dismay.

 

Unabashedly taken from Wikipedia...

In 1952: the Shemp Era

"Production was significantly faster, with the former four-day filming schedules now tightened to two or three days. In another cost-cutting measure, White would create a "new" Stooge short by borrowing footage from old ones, setting it in a slightly different storyline, and filming a few new scenes often with the same actors in the same costumes. White was initially very subtle when recycling older footage: he would reuse only a single sequence of old film, re-edited so cleverly that it was not easy to detect. The later shorts were cheaper and the recycling more obvious, with as much as 75% of the running time consisting of old footage. White came to rely so much on older material that he could film the "new" shorts in a single day."

 

Rather interestingly, The Three Stooges' You Nazty Spy (1940) was the 1st Hollywood film to spoof Hitler. It beat Chaplin's The Great Dictator by 9 months.

[cryptique]

Thing is, it's not really a new phenomenon. In the big studio days--especially the Thirties and Forties--quickie remakes were actually far more common than even today (and they didn't wait 20 years before tackling a property over and over again). Directors were under contract, and sometimes the same man was assigned to make the same movie twice just a few years apart.

For example, Hitchcock made two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much -- 1934 and 1956.

[u2roolz]

Remaking Predator is a bad, bad idea.

 

 

I KNOW. How in the hell are you going to find two future governors to be in it?

 

 

Unless they bring back Jesse Ventura and increase his screen time...

 

300 wasn't awful. It was faithful to the original art of the comic. The slo-mo shit got to be too much though.

 

I think it'd be pretty easy to cast the title role...