What’s the record for the fastest remake? What is the least amount of time in which film studios have conspired to bring almost exactly the same movie back to the big screen? There was the French comic spy thriller La Totale!, which was remade by James Cameron as True Lies only three years later. And it is arguable that Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) is just a sillier remake of his own The Evil Dead, from 1981. But generally it takes a couple of decades before Hollywood is ready to hit go on a straight-up rerun of a popular movie.
Why then, are we apparently getting a remake of DreamWorks’ fabulous How to Train Your Dragon only 13 years after the original movie hit multiplexes, and only four after its second sequel, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World? Couldn’t DreamWorks just cook up another adventure for Hiccup, Astrid, Snotlout, Ruffnut and Tuffnut if audiences are desperate for more loop the looping with Toothless the Night Fury and his airborne, fire-breathing pals?
Apparently not. And it’s all Disney’s fault. The success (at least most of the time) of the Mouse House’s mission to transform its back catalogue of animated classics into fancy, CGI-assisted live-action films seems to have inspired a sea change in Hollywood. No longer does the arrival of a hit movie mean a sequel is the most likely next step. Instead, a single idea can be transformed into pixels and back, over and over again, many times over the next few decades.
Just you wait until Disney works out that it can squeeze even more creative juice out of its properties by remaking Toy Story in live action, and then Avatar as an animated film (though some might argue that would just be an unauthorised remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest). Or perhaps Disney could bring Frozen back to the big screen with fewer songs and real, cod-Nordic medieval settings? Then DreamWorks could return the favour with a live-action Shrek, starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson as the grumpy green ogre. Or perhaps someone with an even greater gift for comedy (a returning Mike Myers even?) via mo-cap?
The possibilities are endless if it’s no longer necessary to wait 20 years before recycling any given creative property. I’m imagining an 18 certificate live-action take on Wall-E, with those famous rogue robots on board the Axiom transformed into even more violent killer machines. Who might play the Minions in a live-action remake of the Despicable Me films? And what about a new version of A Bug’s Life shot with real mutant talking insects?
Truth be told, this is all part of Hollywood’s endless recycling programme – a process that has been taking place since the dawn of cinema. Without it we wouldn’t have the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, or the last three remakes of A Star Is Born, including the Oscar-winning Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga take from five years ago. Martin Scorsese would never have made The Departed, David Cronenberg wouldn’t have made The Fly and Michael Mann would never have delivered Heat. On the other hand, we would not have had to sit through Gus Van Sant’s bizarrely pointless shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
And therein lies the rub. Remakes need to differ from the originals enough that they have a genuine reason to exist on an artistic and cultural level. Will a live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, from the same director who oversaw the original, Dean DeBlois, really cut the mustard? Could Toothless possibly convey the same level of pseudo-feline cuteness in photorealistic CGI as he does in stylised animation? It’s hard to say, but let’s hope that there really are good reasons to return to icy Berk all over again. Presumably the bit where Hiccup gets his leg chopped off is going to be a mite more gruesome this time around. And the prospect of Hollywood’s digital design dons going to town on all those spectacular dragons is pretty enticing – for audiences as well as for DreamWorks’ accountants.
