Guess everybody didn’t want to cut ‘Footloose’ this weekend after all.

The much ballyhooed remake came in a close second to ‘Real Steel’ at the box office, with a “prequel” to the 1982 horror hit ‘The Thing’ trailing behind in third place.

Will that stop – or even slow down – the number of remakes getting greenlit? Likely not, but it should. This year has already seen remakes of ‘Arthur,’ ‘The Mechanic,’ ‘Fright Night,’ ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ flop. The public has spoken – remakes are even less likely to succeed than original fare, so why bother?

The success of the 2011 prequel ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ suggests a better way to squeeze every last drop out of an existing film franchise.

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IMDB News:

While [Hop's] gross was slightly below the $38.1 million recorded for Rango last month, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year, it was far overshadowed by last year’s Clash of the Titans, which opened during the same weekend (Easter weekend) with $61.2 million.

Indeed, the total domestic box office this weekend came in at 29.6 percent below the same weekend a year ago. For the year, total box-office revenue is down 20.3 percent, while attendance is down 21.5 percent.

Anyone see anything on the horizon that might turn this around? Arthur? Scream 4? Hoodwinked 2? Thor? Priest?

One of the dirty little secrets behind the box office revenues of the last few years is that the year was saved by one humongous and somewhat unexpected hit: “Alice in Wonderland,” “Avatar,” “The Dark Knight.” One stumble, and instead of flatlining attendance, you have a calamitous year.

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Actor and comedian Sammy Petrillo passed away over the weekend.  Who is Sammy Petrillo?  Good question.  I wasn’t familiar with him either when I heard the news, but after a few minutes on Al Gore’s Internet I found out a lot.

Sammy was a Bronx born actor and comedian who had some minor success in the 1950s.  He took his physical similarity to Jerry Lewis and ran with it.  He became known as the “fake Jerry Lewis” after creating an onstage and onscreen persona that mimicked Lewis’ shtick.  He even went as far as to hook up with a Dean Martinesque straight man named Duke Mitchell.  The real Jerry Lewis wasn’t amused and even went so far as to intimidate others in Hollywood not to feature Petrillo on their shows and bullied Vegas venues into blackballing his act. 

Most reboots are epic fails.

The point of bringing up Petrillo (besides encouraging you to watch his funny performance in “Bela Lugosi meets the Brooklyn Gorilla” on YouTube) is to illustrate that the “trend” of ripoffs, remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings is nothing new. Take it from me, the guy who shamelessly made “Transmorphers,” remakes and ripoffs are part of Hollywood history.  What is more depressing is the fact that re-imagining and remakes are also part of the political culture.

Our society has a sort of “political amnesia”; forcing us to repeat the same economic and policy mistakes every thirty years or so.  What else is the Obama administration but a “remake” of the Clinton administration (with almost half the original cast!)?  You can almost hear the pitch meeting.  “It’s FDR meets Clinton!  We reboot the franchise.  We forget about the Carter episode just like we pretended that Superman III and IV never happened.” (more…)

I give up. I knew there’d be a tipping point eventually, but I didn’t expect it to involve little red and white plastic pegs and my 4-year-old Godson saying, “B6…Hit!” I surrendered to the idea that there is very little hope for genuine or inspiring creativity coming out of Hollywood while Universal is forging a deal with Hasbro to bring Battleship to the big screen.

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!

The idea of turning a board game into a movie isn’t earth shattering. Jumanji did it about a fictional game, and there are already deals on the books to bring Ouija Board, Candyland and Monopoly to your local multiplex. But when you mix the “you sunk my carrier” news with the scoop that Disney is making a movie of Tomorrowland as a follow-up to Pirates of the Caribbean, and toss in just a dollop of the ongoing march of mid-80s remakes like the approaching new Videodrome, Red Dawn and Fright Night, we must at least consider prosecuting for fraud anyone in Hollywood who calls themselves “creative.” (more…)

The remake of Friday the 13th is notable only for its title; we have seen this stuff literally hundreds of times before, sometimes done better (whatever that means to you in this context) and sometimes done worse. This new picture is a remake only in the sense that it borrows the famous name, the setting and a portion of the premise. Nothing wrong with that approach, it’s just that when somebody appropriates all those elements, they also appropriate a measure of expectation, even obligation, to do something memorable, or so I thought. These filmmakers failed to do any such thing. Maybe they never intended to. Movies are a business, after all, and there’s lots of bank to be made just thrashing a franchise.

Horror movies are almost all remakes now, and they fall almost exclusively into two big categories: Remakes of Old US Movies, and Remakes of Asian Flicks. Both tend to fail at the same rate in being great or even passable entertainment, and that rate is approximately 100 percent. Last year’s The Eye and Shutter were all remakes of Asian originals and all were pretty much forgettable. On the US side—and again, sticking just to 2008—we got Prom Night (which I thought was pretty good, but not many other folks agreed), and fresh (sic) installments of the Saw and George Romero’s …of the Dead franchises. Overall, these too were weak, and so were the dozen or so others I could have mentioned. (more…)