Back to the future (From Bournemouth Echo)

Back to the future

9:30am Friday 30th July 2010 in

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AS big budget remakes of The Karate Kid and The A Team open at local cinemas today, it seems Hollywood is going back to the future yet again in search of new material to feed its hunger for risk-free profits.

In recent months we’ve seen new-look versions of Clash of the Titans, The Taking of Pelham 123, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Death at a Funeral. They’ve even remade Halloween II, a sequel.

Meanwhile, countless other Hollywood releases have been remakes of European or Asian films, especially the recent glut of extreme horror flicks aimed a teenage audiences.

And there’s more to come with new film versions of tried and tested crowd pleasers like The Birds, Arthur, Battle Royale, The Warriors and Excalibur all at various stages of completion. Word is there are even film adaptations of board games Monopoly and Battleships in the pipeline!

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Are remakes a good thing? Do they work? It all comes down to what people are willing to pay to see of course, but generally a film remake can only succeeds if it brings something new to the source material.

Sometimes that can be as elementary as the English language, or colour, or special effects; others benefit from wholesale restructuring and a completely different approach.

Equally though, deviating from a much-loved original can kill a remake stone dead.

Purists tend to throw up their hands in horror at the prospect of yet another bunch of happy memories being desecrated by the latest Hollywood remake, but the film business has always plundered other media for ideas so why not its own history?

The Sound of Music was originally a Broadway musical, Gone With the Wind was adapted from a novel, to say nothing of the legion of films based on the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and other literary greats. Video games are routinely remade as films these days, to the point that many are designed with the future movie version in mind.

So, as ever, there’s still plenty of mileage in that hoary old cliché – you pays your money and takes your choice.

* What do you think? Are movie remakes a good idea? Which ones worked for you; and which didn’t? What would you like to see remade? Log on to bournemouthecho.co.uk and tell us