How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Grudgingly Tolerate Remakes

I was on Facebook recently, as is too often the case, and a Facebook friend I do not actually know in real life (like the vast majority of my social media chums) discovered that there was going to be a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles starring Kevin Hart and Will Smith and was not at all pleased by this development At all. In fact, it rendered her positively apoplectic, but she seemed deeply sad about this news as well as angry. 

On one hand I knew exactly why this individual was upset. If I may make a sweeping generalization, remakes are fucking terrible. That’s not true of all of them, of course, but it’s true of the majority. But remakes aren’t just overwhelmingly bad. They’re also opportunistic and mercenary, often driven by commerce and greed rather than an organic need to re-tell a story that had already been told before, and successfully enough for someone to want to tell it again.

It’s exceedingly rare for a remake to top the original, just as it is uncommon for a sequel to be better than its predecessor. Besides, people feel protective about the art and entertainment that they love, and that has been important to them, for any number of reasons, many deeply personal. The more emotionally invested you are in something, the more likely you are to feel defensive about it, and social media is nothing if not a place for performative displays of intense fandom. 

The Facebook friend complained that the original Planes, Trains and Automobiles was perfect, and could not be improved upon and consequently this god-forsaken remake could only be a blight on its good name. 

Actually that last part is the only part they did not state explicitly but it is implicit and also very wrong. 

Here’s the thing about remakes: if they’re bad and forgettable, as they often are, then nobody fucking remembers them. They aren’t part of the cultural conversation. They’re not talked about. They don’t endure. Many of them disappear almost instantly after being rejected by critics and audiences alike as just another greedy, opportunistic remake that never comes close to justifying its existence. 

For example, when it was announced that Point Break, Katherine Bigelow’s beloved 1991 cult classic about an undercover cop investigating a ring of surfing, sky-diving bank robbers was being remade, it inspired the usual online backlash. 

Point Break was great! It didn’t need to be remade! These schmoes would never be able to replace Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the public imagination! They were just in it for the money! This sequel to Point Break won’t be able to hold a candle to the original! 

All of those things happened to be true, of course. I saw Point Break out of morbid curiosity and I legitimately cannot remember a goddamned thing about it. NOTHING. If you held a gun to my head and told me I had to describe the remake of Point Break or die the best I could do would probably be to say its plot was similar to the original. 

Point Break actually ended up grossing over one hundred million dollars at the worldwide box-office yet it still seems to have left no cultural footprint whatsoever whereas Point Break is fucking iconic. When someone asks a friend if they want to watch Point Break there is a zero percent chance that they’re talking about the 2015 version despite it only being five years old. 

No one in their right mind would consider the Katherine Bigelow directed Point Break redundant or unnecessary, since a newer version with more sophisticated technology exists. If anything, the fact that they made a movie with the same premise as Point Break decades later that was quickly and completely forgotten makes the original seem more magical and impressive and memorable by comparison. 

I’m no Kevin Hart fan but I also think remakes that switch the genders or races of the leads have more of a reason to exist than remakes that don’t because representation is important. It’s empowering for little girls to see a movie where women are busting ghosts, rather than answering phones for male ghostbusters or serving as love interests. 

For decades Hollywood told stories about white men out of racism and sexism, of course, but also out of a mercenary conviction that mainstream audiences weren’t interested in movies or TV shows about people of color, or women unless they were confined to a series of stereotypical roles. 

I do not have a problem with those stories being told with women and POC now, particularly when there are women and POC behind the camera and writing the screenplays as well. Besides, Hart’s recent credits include the critically acclaimed, smash hit 2017 remake Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which was was widely heralded as being better than the 1990s original starring Robin Williams, and Jumanji’s 2019 sequel, which similarly was praised as better than its predecessor. 

If it does actually get made, will Planes, Trains and Automobiles suck? Possibly. The track record for remakes is not great but I think there is something to be gained from making a big mainstream movie that depicts black characters as ordinary folks who just want to get home for Thanksgiving and not as cops or criminals.

That’s why I’m not mad at remakes: if they suck, no one cares and they disappear and if they’re good then they make the world of pop culture at least a little bit better through their existence. It’s not quite a win-win proposition, since, as I have repeatedly conceded, most remakes suck, but it’s at least nowhere near as dire as people who get reflexively get mad at the existence of remakes of movies they like make it out to be. 

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