By In 1998 Gus Van Sant decided to remake Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Van Sant didn't try to top Hitchcock's vision; instead, he copied the film almost shot for shot, with the same script and score, but using advances in technology to dial up the on-screen violence.
Sant's Psycho was so woeful that it won a string of Golden Raspberry awards, including Worst Director. Speaking on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2018, Sant explained that, "It wasn’t really about learning about Hitchcock, it was more that during the Nineties the joke about the executives was that they would rather make a sequel than they would an original piece, because there was less risk."
Well, Gus, that affliction has only got worse. Last year, to look at a cinema marquee was like being dragged back in time, filled as they were with remakes of The Lion King, Jumanji, Cats, Aladdin, Men In Black, Charlie’s Angels and Dumbo. Every single one was worse than the original that inspired it. But despite the reviews, the trend shows no sign of dying. In 2020, there's a slew more to suffer through, including The Witches, The Secret Garden, and Godzilla Vs. Kong.
These films play on our fixation with nostalgia; they let us revisit old friends in a worlds that we're already familiar with, as though studios think we're incapable of learning new names, plots and faces.
Last December, this trend reached its nadir with the release of Cats, which made the already ludicrous stage show look like Beckett in comparison. Today saw the release of the Robert Downey Jr-starring Dolittle, which has charged into an early lead for the worst film of 2020. Both centre on stories that have been dug up from the past to try and entice people to the cinema. There's no timely significance to justify revamping these tales, nor are fans crying out for a new instalment. They are pure cynicism; film studios are fearful about investing in new ideas, so instead mine the past for something people already recognise. These days, the most important thing in Hollywood isn't a great idea, it's IP – intellectual property. As Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, told the New York Times in 2016: “There’s nothing as helpful to a programmer as a title or a show that has brand equity already built into it.”
What's easy to forget, though, as that these are weird stories. Cats is based on TS Eliot's poetry collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (yes, the same TS Eliot who wrote The Wasteland; no, we don't have space here to unpack that spectrum-spanning bibliography) and Dolittle is taken from Hugh Lofting children's book The Story of Dr Dolittle. Both are deeply odd. In Eliot's, a tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to be reborn and granted a new life; in Lofting's. a doctor and veterinarian who can speak to animals voyages around the world. If you tried pitching either as an original idea in 2020, you'd be laughed out of the room.
Instead, both films have relied on a prepackaged idea, hoping that people will be so excited to be reunited with Mr Mistoffelees, or to see Robert Downey Jr. conversing with a pushmi-pullyu, that they'll ignore the lacklustre plot stringing the whole thing together. These are rushed, ill-thought-out films, which reek of desperation in how much they want you to welcome them back with open arms.
It's not just reboots of once-enjoyed art that is being pilfered. Everything from Angry Birds, to emojis to Sonic the Hedgehog has been seized on as worth translating to the big screen. Remember, someone once walked into an ideas meeting, said "imagine a film about the poo emoji", and was given fifty million actual dollars. (We should point out the notable exception to this rule, The Lego Movie, which was made brilliant by a sharp script, great voiceover talent and direction by Chris Miller and Phil Lord. In other words, everything that the hammy and confused Cats and Dolittle so desperately lack).
It isn't enough to recycle something old and cross your fingers it works a second time. Disney's classic films, from Pinocchio to Snow White, took timeworn stories but reimagined them, creating films full of originality and heart. They brought the conversation forward, just as Greta Gerwig did in her recent, Oscar-nominated take on Little Women, which focuses on the plight of female writers and the compromises women are forced to make.
Otherwise, we're just clinging on to a narrowing set of stories, diminishing what they were in the first place every time they're remade. Cats and Dolittle prove that when you remove risk from the equation, the art you end up making is safe, but generally bad.
Van Sant, at least, didn't seem too upset by the reaction to his Hitchcock rip-off, reportedly once joking: "I'm thinking of remaking Psycho again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it." Perhaps film studios can follow suit.
