ORIGINALITY is hardly the hallmark of today’s film industry. The biggest film of 2017 at the American box office is a remake of “Beauty and the Beast”; it will be surpassed by “The final Jedi”,which opens this week and is the squillionth episode of the Star Wars saga. The ten highest-grossing films in Hollywood this year are all sequels or remakes.
As the film industry struggles to reverse a decline in box-office receipts (see article), it will keep returning to the consolation of the familiar. Franchises like Star Wars will steamroller on. Remakes are trickier. Well over 100 are thought to be in the works, or from “Private Benjamin” to “Fantastic Voyage”. Some will get a 2018 twist: the price in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”,a 1980s comedy approximately two con artists, is a tech billionaire. But not all. The following projects are rumoured to be...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com