I don’t have Netflix anymore but this seems in line with Netflix. Would be great if an adaptation done today cared about the author’s vision. These companies could have some mega hit shows but decide that isn’t important
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (58)
sorted by:
"Re-imaginings" almost never work.
Strangely enough, one that DID is one of my favorite movies of all time: Scarface.
Yeah, the Al Pacino movie wasn't the original. The original came out in 1932 and starred Paul Muni. It was about moving alcohol during Prohibition.
You can easily "reimagine" a story by simply copying the general premise but making it completely different in terms of both setting and target audience.
Look up the various Cinderella stories that throw out things like The Princess Dairies from 2001, and then flip both the protag and target audience to men so you end up with Kingsman.
They are both stories about a young adult finding out that they are secretly connected to some fantastical world which takes them away from their shitty life, except in the case of the girls' story it turns into "You're a princess,
HarryHarriet", while Kingsman is "You're a spy, bruv".Most are just some form or another of the monomyth anyway, and doing something Narnia-esque wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world if these parasites had any creative ability at all, but both multiple and repeated failures of novel works, in addition to things like the latter seasons of Game of Thrones show what happen when the source material author isn't around any more and why showrunners are showrunners and not authors.
One of my favorite E;R gags was him pointing out that Narnia is, at it's core, an Isekai story. Kids from the real world getting whisked away to a fantasy one where they become heroes. It just doesn't occur to us that that's what it is, because Narnia is more grounded and less blatantly tropey than what we expect from the genre.
Hold on, that got me thinking.
Would Fellowship of The Rings be considered a slice of life story then?
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou and The Fly are a couple of others that worked, and I'm seeing a pattern. It seems they only work when very loosely based on the original.
Edit: and could add The Thing to the list.
While Cronenberg's Fly is a superior movie it doesn't have Vincent Price's tiny head on a fly body tingling out "help me," in Chipmunk voice while stuck in a web as a spider approaches
I saw the fly after I saw the Simpsons reference to that on the Halloween episode
Same.
Forbidden Planet too. That was a reimagining of The Tempest I think
I enjoy the original. The Pacino version is a classic. That is an update that makes sense since prohibition was long over by that point. Also, I think the Sci-Fi channel’s reimagine of Wizard of Oz wasn’t bad. Tin Man I think it was called. From early 00s