Film Remakes
Why do we have so many remakes? Why are some movies remade and others are not? Why are some so bad?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Mary Poppins.
Speaker B:Peter, Mary Poppins, why are we talking about her? So, recently it was announced that there's a remake of Mary Poppins being made, starring Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins. Now, as much as I like Emily Blunt and she's a talented actress, singer etc, she's no Julie Andrews is she? Let's face it. She's not in the same league really. So it got me wondering, why remake this movie which isn't that old, is still brilliant. It's pretty old.
Speaker A:50 years?
Speaker B:Yeah, but it's not in terms of, it's still within living memory.
Speaker C:You can sit down and watch it and not go, oh this is an old film. It's not like watching a silent movie or something.
Speaker B:I mean it's got Dick Van Dyke in it, which is obviously a bad thing, doing a pretty terrible accent.
Speaker C:Oh, he's amazing.
Speaker B:But apart from him, it's a brilliant movie, so why does it need to be remade? So it got me thinking, what are the criteria that cause a production company to decide, let's remake a movie? Obviously they're looking to make some money out of it, but why did they choose Mary Poppins? Why didn't they do another classic? Like The Sound of Music. Like The Sound of Music, or West Side Story.
Speaker C:It's really inconceivable isn't it? I mean remaking Mary Poppins would have been inconceivable until you told me about it.
Speaker B:So keep going Peter. Well that's it really, so why did they choose it? And will we forever get these remakes, some of them which are terrible, you know, terrible sequels and terrible reboots, etc? Well let's broaden this out. I mean, what's with all the remakes?
Speaker A:So I remember about 20, 30 years ago, seeing on a comedy sketch somewhere, where it was talking about Rambo 8 or something, and it was just the whole absurdity of it.
Speaker B:Back to the future too, there's Jaws 43 or something playing at the cinema.
Speaker A:Yeah, and whereas now, there are definitely franchises where that's what they've become, where you know, number 8 is no big deal. No one sort of scoffs at that.
Speaker B:But some of these franchises are brilliant. So the Marvel series, they are brilliant movies, they make tons of money, huge fan base, including myself, big fan. And yet, they're the same genre, things like the Spider-Man, the endless Spider-Man reboots.
Speaker C:I know, it's like they're now rebooting them faster than they can release them. It's completely unbelievable.
Speaker B:They were awful.
Speaker D:So there's sequels, and then there's remakes, and I think there's obviously a distinction.
Speaker C: days is a remake. So between: Speaker A:Okay. So like a dog returning to its own vomit. Well, look, let's just talk about Mary Poppins for a moment because it's actually not a remake. It's because it takes place, I think, you know, when the original children have grown up a bit. So I guess really is a sequel.
Speaker C:But I didn't know that. I thought it was a full up, full on remake. I haven't looked into the film.
Speaker A:So the link that you all sent me, none of you actually looked.
Speaker C:Oh, I didn't know.
Speaker A:There is like a two minute trailer.
Speaker C:And I just I got as far as being outraged and then stopped posting on Twitter.
Speaker B:That's how things done.
Speaker C:Well, I think that's what they call a soft reboot is where you have. It's a bit like what they did with Annie a few years ago. You know, you take the same more or less the exact same story and you sit up, you bring it up to date in a different way.
Speaker A:Let's put it in another way. This let's turn it around a little bit. Even the original films, even if we call them original, as we all know, there's only about five stories out there. You know, boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl doesn't like boy. Boy gets girl. I mean, that's one version. And there's, you know, other permutations of stories. So even the original ones are going to be following a similar kind of story. It's just with the remakes or even with the sequels, it's just returning to a universe or characters with which we're familiar. So, I mean, what's the big deal? We shouldn't be that worried about it, should we?
Speaker D:No. Well, I think for me it's the the lack of innovation in in the movie industry in particular, even in the way it does remakes. Right. So on the whole, the reason you remake a film is because the first one was good and people know about it. And so you're remaking it. So you're on a little bit of a hiding, hiding to nothing, you know, in terms of regression to the main. And, you know, it's going to be difficult to live up to that, that original film. But other other sort of artistic areas do this better. Look at music and cover cover versions. Right. You know, often cover versions are better than the original song. And there are many famous cover versions, you know, like All Along the Watchtower, Tainted Love, Shares the Shoop Shoop Song. Don't leave me this way. Don't leave me this way. Quite. So, you know, there are there are lots of effectively remakes of the song of older songs, but that are very successful and very innovative. And that's, I think, the the the key. What the what the movie industry isn't great at is redoing something in a innovative and giving it a fresh.
Speaker C:Yeah. And obviously with visual arts, remakes are baked into the history of visual arts. You know, there are set compositions like the Pieta or whatever, you know, which you know, you know what you're going to put in it. And it's just the way you paint it, which which makes it stand out.
Speaker D:So there's nothing wrong per se with revisiting an old idea, an old theme.
Speaker A:I mean, Shakespeare ripped off loads of his stories, right? Hold on. Isn't this to do with cost and risk? So making a movie and making a successful movie cost lots of money, right? It costs, what, 50 million, 100 million pounds. I don't know, whatever it costs. Making a song costs money, but it's not as expensive. Yeah, I think so. Therefore, you need to limit your risks. And so it's easy just to go to a formula.
Speaker B:There are many more variables in movies as well, I think. So if you're just if you're just reusing a melody and the baseline of a song, there's two or three variables in that. You know, the artist is one. But with the movie, there are lots and lots of variables and big company, big movie companies like Sony and MGM. They see it as a business opportunity for them. They do terrible things like product placement and all sorts of things. We're just distracted from the original story, the original vision of the movie, which may have been a bit of a cult classic back in its day.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, I think just sorry, before you come in, Chris, I feel we're going a bit rudderless.
Speaker C:Just to go back to what you said, Fraser, about cost. Right. So, I mean, you know, that's right. Chris is right. Yes, there are covers which are better than the originals. But I bet for any given song, there are thousands of covers which are much worse. You know, every cruise singer is banging out covers of songs in a much worse way than whatever we consider to be the original recording. So so I think that, you know, actually probably encompassed by the same underlying theory here, which is risk and reward. And and the you know, I think most people are agreed that, you know, obviously these making films is getting more expensive. Cinema sales are, you know, lower. Cinema tickets are more expensive now. The whole thing means that you've got to get it right. And doing a sequel is a really, really easy way of getting it right. You've got a very good chance of making money with a sequel, certainly compared to making making an original film, which is disappointing.
Speaker B:A lot of your marketing is already done for you because you just piggyback.
Speaker C:Yeah. But in theory, that should mean. Well, what we should do is be churning out lots of cheap original films and then lots of slightly is almost like a filtering process. We should be the budget should be ramping up with each sequel.
Speaker D:And I think that kind of does happen. That kind of does happen. From the indie scene, you get a breakout hit and then you get number two, number three, particularly in the horror genre.
Speaker C:Why do why do sequels have to be they seem so often to be? I mean, their ratings, for example, on average. And as you said, this could be regression to the mean. But on average, the ratings for sequels are almost always uniformly worse than the originals. That's really disappointing, isn't it? I mean, yeah, fine. You're going to get the money anyway. At least make a film that's good. Make a film that's cheap. We haven't mentioned Star Wars.
Speaker B:Why not make sequels just as cheap as the originals were? Yeah, but that's tricky, isn't it?
Speaker C:Make five sequels for every for every successful prequel. See what happened. I mean, we haven't mentioned the stuff. We've got podcasts with me and Chris. We mentioned Star Wars once.
Speaker A:No, it actually is. That makes question of sequels. The critically better, better judged than the original wish. Yes. Star Wars. Godfather. Anyway. Anyway, I'm lost. Where are we going? I mean, we've done this. We wrapped up. Is that it? We're only halfway through our podcast.
Speaker D:Well, I think the sort of, you know, moving on from art and into, you know, a sort of setting that everybody can relate to is, you know, the revisiting of old ideas and the generation of new ideas. And is it is it necessarily a bad thing to continually reproduce the same criteria to try and deliver success? You know, in their arguments that, yes, it is. If you look at, you know, the fall of Imperial China or something like that, you know, one of the arguments about why they didn't succeed was because they continued to dwell in the past and didn't innovate. But is that necessarily true? If it is true, how do you generate new ideas out of nowhere without, you know, that that antecedent and ensure this or maximise the chances of them succeeding? So like in the movie industry, example, you know, if you had some formula for turning out new films that were going to be just as commercially successful as reboots and sequels, obviously you would do that. But nobody has that formula. So how can how can we think about, you know, successful, lower risk innovation? And also, is it true that just doing the same thing over and over again is bad?
Speaker A:I mean, can you really innovate? I mean, sorry, let's just think about this. What's what's the law? I don't know to what extent your filmgoers, but film watches. But what's the last really innovative film you can think about? I mean, let's just pause. Let's have a think.
Speaker D:Well, interesting. My immediate answer was going to be the actor. And then I thought, no, wait a minute. That's the oldest reboot of them all. You know, that's going back to to a very old form of cinema. So actually.
Speaker A:But it is genuinely innovative. The treatment that I think it is innovative. I think, yes, it's revisiting something from a long time ago by going back to the sort of first era of cinema. But I don't think that makes it less less innovative in what it did. I mean, when I can think of, for example, in a film that no matter how many times you watch it always feels fresh is I really like Pulp Fiction. And I think what's innovative about that is the editing and the way the story is cut up. And it's and it's non. What's the word I'm looking for? Linear. It's non-linear. It's non-linear editing.
Speaker D:But again, Tarantino would say very influenced by, you know, cinematic style. And the whole film is full of references. And maybe that's the key. Right. Because if you look at like successful remakes. Right. So something like The Magnificent Seven is a remake of The Seven Samurai. But there's a whole genre change in there. You know, language, a difference, very different cultural setting. But quintessentially, the story structure is the same and the concepts are the same. And maybe that's maybe that's key to it. It's it's about, you know, just a twist on on on the old. But but something that really makes it feel feel new.
Speaker C:Yeah. I mean, I think I think this this talking about innovation and I don't want to I don't want to assume, by the way, that innovative equals good because, of course, it doesn't. But when Peter was talking about, you know, variables. Right. If we think about the space, that space of possible films, you could say that. Well, you know, if a if a film does well, we know that it's at some kind of local maximum and or, you know, possibly it's at a high point locally. It's doing relatively well. So your thought is, well, if we want to be relatively safe, we won't move too far away from that. And that's why a lot of things are going to get held constant, be it the characters or the actors or the directors going, going a long way away from places we know are successful, which is what innovation is. And it does seem even though, you know, bad films always seem like they're obviously bad in hindsight and you wonder how they ever got made. Actually, sometimes really, really innovative films can can can, you know, completely change cinema. Star Wars is a good example.
Speaker D:2001 Space Odyssey was was was, you know, both commercially and by critics not liked at the time.
Speaker C:Right. And yeah. So, I mean, that's the thing that you it's inherently going to be a gamble. Star Wars could have been a catastrophe. And in fact, it completely out of, you know, it's got influence on cinema still ongoing today. But then there's things I mean, I don't know. There are there are things like if you take someone like Kubrick, I mean, you know, Kubrick has done almost a film in every genre. And and, you know, is he being innovative? Well, not really. If you look at things like The Shining, what makes it stand out is just how incredibly well made it is. You know, in terms of that, that story could well have been told by, you know, a lesser director and it would be a schlocky B movie. You know, but when Kubrick does it, it's brilliant. Not because anything is particularly innovative, but just because he does it really well. So, yeah, I want to hear from Peter.
Speaker B:Yeah. Going back to the analogy of having a sort of multidimensional space representing the all possible movies. And Nick's point that it is a rational thing to do is to just change a few things, not deviate too far from your local maxima. And you should be hit on success. But I think what actually happens is when when a cult movie becomes a big hit and then the license is bought by MGM or Sony or whoever. And they they seek to make the sequel and or the remake to and to capitalize on that previous success is they change more things than they actually realize they're changing. So they may have exactly the same actors, the same director, the same the same script. But actually, just by the nature of the way it's produced, the bigger production, more budget, more special effects, whatever, ends up being quite a different beast than it originally was.
Speaker C:Yeah, there's another thing, actually, which I just that's prompted a thought, which is that actually, of course, we're not talking about just, you know, points in a multidimensional space where you can be. It is actually quite like mining or something. There's a certain amount of tolerance that, you know, for a certain thing, you know, that the first time you do something in a new, innovative, creative way, you know that you're effectively, you know, it's virgin territory. But, of course, then when 50 other people are all making the same film, you know, it's each of those is going to it's going to deliver less and less. So it is it is actually like a rivalrous like you're using up resources in a certain creative area. I mean, for crying out loud, superhero films. I how are they still making them? But Peter loves them, obviously. So, you know, we've got him to blame.
Speaker B:And there's also I mean, there's also fun. So the finite resource in space in any given genre, but also the there's environmental effects. So, you know, five years from now, we may have gone culturally may have completely gone off superhero movies. They might just they might be passé and silly, a bit like historical. I think they are now about a bit like historical movies about the Second World War. They're kind of out of favor.
Speaker C:But it's probably worth mentioning that Peter is actually sitting here in his Black Panther costume. He loves superhero films so much.
Speaker B:It's Captain America, actually. Yes. So there's a there's lots of. So I think what. So the so when they come to make the remake, they change lots of things and it deviates further from the original movie. But they're also doing it at a different time. So they're in competition with other movies. So if there's a if there's a finite capacity for the public to consume disaster movies, then making a disaster movie along with everybody else is not a good idea. And the appetite for disaster movies may have may have dissipated.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. What what's what genres or subgenres might are there? You know, are there lovely sort of virgin fields to be prospected? I'm just thinking in terms of, you know, I think we are absolutely saturated or at least we aren't. We have been. And which is why nobody makes them anymore. But zombie films, you know, where there was everything was a zombie film about three or four years ago. And of course, you know, George A. Romero like Night of the Living Dead. Absolutely groundbreaking. First zombie. First sort of mainstream zombie film. No, but I mean, you know, and widely regarded as one of the most important horror films ever made. But of course, not by no means. The first horror film, you know, zombie films are a subgenre of horror films. And he didn't innovate a whole. He didn't invent a whole new genre. He invented a new type of, you know, threat in that genre. And I just wonder if we might speculate what kinds of genres or subgenres do you think is underutilized? Where should people be going? I think we need more war films.
Speaker A:There's not enough top quality war films around at the moment.
Speaker D:But war films have definitely had their debt. You know, I mean, there were lots of John Wayne and, you know, Dirty Dozen kind of films. We had a lot of Vietnam films. We did have in the 80s.
Speaker C:I'd say, well, it feels to me like there were more films that were Vietnam related than have recently been made about Iraq and Afghanistan. Although there were a few of those. There have been a few.
Speaker A:But being specific, I want to have more Second World War films out there. Right. There's not enough at the moment. That's my feeling. Yeah.
Speaker D:Maybe one's about cutting edge analysts. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be really.
Speaker A:D.I. the movie. Yeah. Look, I know you've asked a question there.
Speaker B:Peter. Yeah, I think I think something that's not very common at the moment, a kind of classic investigative murder mystery type movies. I'm thinking a Poirot kind of movie. I mean, Kenneth Branagh Poirot was fairly recent a couple of years ago. Quite good. But I think there's space for more of those because there's lots of people who love that kind of genre of movie. But at the moment, it is all superhero movies and chick flicks and just, you know, the normal stuff.
Speaker A:It's all about the action and lots of stuff. All quite glitzy, but not much necessarily going on underneath. But. Yeah. So I like that. Nick.
Speaker C:Well, this is more of a forecast than a what I'd like to see particularly. But, you know, you mentioned Second World War films. It's unlikely we'd have had many of those if the Second World War hadn't happened. True. Am I right? Probably. So you look for a thing. You're saying you don't want any Third World War films. Well, sort of coming to that. Obviously, in the 80s, we had the Cold War and concomitantly some pretty good Cold War films. I'm thinking, you know, War Games, Rocky IV, Red Dawn. What have we got now? We've got. Brexit. We've got the culture. Well, I'm going to put it all into the one big bracket of the culture war. We've got Russia back on the menu. I think that's kind of fun. That could be a rich scene. You know, global. We could have another Cold War-y type thing. But no, I'm thinking more the culture war. So I'm thinking the whole kind of, you know, identity politics, the film. But as a theme in films, you know, sort of the issue of, you know, a privilege and of, you know, political correctness and affirmative action and all that stuff. I think that's something that, you know, as soon as just like as soon as Donald Trump came up and showed everyone that you could be successful and completely ignore all the things that people thought you had to do. And at the moment, I can see Hollywood. Hollywood is not gonna make a film that's in any way sort of casting aspersions on that kind of mainstream identity politics sort of set of views. But all it'll take is one person to make a film, which is, let's say, quite reactionary. And I can see that bit of the floodgates being opened.
Speaker A:Well, also, that ties into actually one thing I was thinking. It'd be nice. I don't know if you exactly call it a genre, but comedy. I think we're lacking some really top notch, good quality comedy films, and that would tie nicely into this culture. I think so. Truly subversive. Yeah. Chris.
Speaker D:Well, I think for me, the the the thing that I would find most interesting is, you know, some technologies have made films possible. So the fact that you, you know, CGI became a thing has made all of these superhero films. Yes, we had superhero films before that, but they were limited in what they could deliver. And so I'm really looking for a new technology to come along and enable a new a new genre. I'm not sure what that technology might be. That could be something we we focus on in another part. Maybe VR. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Some something more more immersive that enables you to perhaps get more of a more of a genre of, you know, realism kitchen kitchen sink drama. Yeah.
Speaker C:Good acting and screenwriting. That would be an exciting technology to see. Yeah, I don't. We probably haven't got time to discuss, you know, actual cinematic technology like 3D and VR. But I would be very surprised if they take off, but they just have a very long history of, you know, a failure in cinema.
Speaker A:I really liked your answers to that question to the question posed by yourself. Okay, we're going to stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.
