If Hollywood loves anything, it’s a remake. Now it’s gotten to the point where they aren’t even waiting for a movie to be released to remake it.
It’s happened with several high profile flicks lately, like “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “Justice League,” and Pixar’s latest, “Elio.” Work on the picture begins with a certain creative team, then the studio fires them and replaces them with a new bunch of people to remake and ultimately finish the film. It happens when producers want to “save” a movie, but most of the time the films are dead on the operating table.
Instead of paying for one movie, the studio pays for two, albeit without the classic “cash-in” quality of making a sequel. For example, despite “Justice League” making $661 million at the worldwide box office, it was commonly regarded as a flop because it cost upwards of $300 million to make, not including a huge marketing budget of $150 million. If you need to work so hard to market something, there’s an obvious question about whether it might have been more efficient to make a better thing in the first place.
Studios can usually hide behind the fact that general audiences haven’t seen the initial versions, so they can claim the money loss was worth it because the films became better. Thanks to the pandemic, that’s no longer the case.
Desperate for new content, Warner Bros. handed $20 million to Zack Synder — the director they’d already fired once — to complete his version of Justice League for HBO Max since it was a way to get a “new” movie without having to deal with COVID. In other words, he remade his remake as he originally intended. If this all feels a bit postmodern, that’s because it is. What even is an original thing, anyway? Huh?
When the “Synder Cut” was released, critics and audiences agreed that the new edition of the superhero picture was an improvement over the previous version because it wasn’t a Frankenstein’s monster. No matter how “disastrous” a movie’s quality is amidst production, I believe it’s always a worse idea to change the creative team half way through. My advice to Hollywood? Hire the people you want the first time, and have the confidence to stick with your decisionmaking.
