Considering EVERYTHING is getting either a remake or a reboot, it’s weird to not see any classic war movies get the old remake treatment?
The obvious answer being, “Well wars aren’t exactly copyrighted so you can just make whatever you want and not have to pay the rights holder” but then again considering to such obscure lengths we’re seeing studios dig for properties to remake, it would make sense to take a war movie with a famous title and remake it especially those who aren’t just about generic battles such as “Where Eagles Dare” or “The Dirty Dozen”.
I know Peter Jackson kept wanting to remake “The Dambusters” but that’s pretty much the only classic war movie I can remember that was potentially pursued for a remake.
The best war movies are made after winning a war. And you have to demonize the enemy. And put the vets on a pedestal. We’re haven’t won the war we’re in. We don’t even know who is on our side. We have a POTUS who puts down Gold Star parents.
It is a different time, different actresses and actors, etc.
I can’t think of actor alive today who could successfully replace John Wayne in a remake of “In Harm’s Way” for instance.
In fact, really, all the good war movies are either too recent to remake, such as “Black Hawk Down” or too old to be relevant enough to remake, I think.
Remake ***Eagles ***without Burton and Eastwood? Just wouldn’t be the same, not even close. Not to mention that when you start to pick the story apart, it was actually a pretty crap movie. Like the Die Hard flicks, everything happens so fast, you don’t have time to dwell on how ridiculous it is; that’s how it stood up originally.
They remade ***Dozen ***for TV back in the '80s, mostly without Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Even the one with them in it sucked big time. I tuned it off after one of the convict GIs said (in another episode) “Man, you were **AWESOME **up there on that horse!”
Add to the above that the average American nowadays knows zilch about 20th century history (or any other kind, for that matter) and cares even less. I remember when Landis’s Twilight Zone was reviewed in ***Time ***magazine. The first thing the reviewer noted was that when the movie opened and showed a swastika flag flying over a Nazi HQ, one of the two teenagers sitting in front of him/her said “Wow! It’s Vietnam!” :smack:
Some people, like me, do. But I wonder how much of the general public is really into movies like Dunkirk (essentially a docudrama) and Fury, a more traditional war flick, albeit more or less based on fact.
Seems to me they’re fixated more on superhero franchises these days.
I think movie studios are more concerned about the international market than they used to be. A movie that vilifies the Japanese or Vietnamese will be harder to sell than a movie that vilifies killer robots.
Also, it’s a generational thing. One reason why war movies were so popular from the '20s through the '60s was that a large percentage of the audience not only remembered WWs I and II, but had actually participated in them in one way or another and were proud of it. It was part of their identity.
I’m not sure most veterans of Vietnam and Iraq would relish seeing the things they lived through fictionalized and presented on the big screen.
Liam Neeson could probably manage it – and I don’t know whether Viggo Mortensen or Jeffrey Dean Morgan could pull it off, but I wouldn’t be too surprised.
The war movies that are still made, or TV series (Britain loves a good 1940s drama), tend to approach the conflict in a very different way, emphasising the harrowing tragedy, the flawed characters, rather than the heroic testosterone-fuelled victories of the wartime era versions. So a remake would end up being so inappropriate they’d have to change them into something unrecognisable, and in that case they may as well be original instead.
Having said that, there have been a few remakes of Westerns in the last decade, so that may evolve into war movies too one day.
I agree with the above, particularly that many viewers actually participated in the wars. The people studios market to do not have that experience, and as noted, they don’t know about, nor care about, history. My best friend once dated a ‘surfer chick’ in the '80s (The '80s!) who, when he mentioned Vietnam (NB: A political reference; we were both children during the war) said, ‘Oh! Is that the one with Hitler in it?’ :smack:
I think that the war genre in part is also transitioning to TV (of course there was always Combat, Band of Brothers, etc.). There are now three (as far as I know) new shows on network TV about Elite Military units (The Brave, SEALs, and Valor) as well as shows like Six, Shooter and the NCIS franchise. So there is a market for them.
That was my thinking as well. It would be awfully hard to remake say… “Patton” without making an entirely new movie out of it. Or for that matter, any of the old 1950s-1960s WWII movies like “Run Silent, Run Deep” or “They Were Expendable” or “The Devil’s Brigade”.
There’s plenty of WWII stories left to mine without remaking old movies that were VERY much a product of a specific time. By that I mean that there are plenty of un-told stories that could be told- of the post-Normandy pursuit warfare, or the Huertgen Forest, or the Alsace-Lorraine fighting, or plenty of 8th AF stories left to be told.
I think a remake of “They Were Expendable” would be weird since you could make a movie about John Bulkeley instead of fictionalizing it. Devils Brigade wouldn’t work because it took a real unit and destroyed anything like the real story. Audiences require more reality in war movies now. Or at least perceived reality.