There seem to be cycles where there are frequent remakes of old movies and television series. There have always been remakes, of course, but they seem to be proliferating in the streaming age. Maybe the companies need a larger offering now that people can watch 24/7? Maybe budgets are lower now that there are no DVD releases (which were a big second wave of income for the companies), and remakes are cheaper? Maybe there are more movie ‘franchises’ now, so remakes/sequels/prequels are part of that? Perhaps it is lucrative to rely on existing fans of the original to watch your remake, giving you ‘easy’ money to make more experimental movies? Remakes seldom seem to do as well as the original, though Top Gun: Maverick is the exception, and did way better at the box office. Films of the 70s and 80s all had a particular ‘look’ because they were shot using Kodak Eastman’s 5247 100T II 35 mm film, and this gives a special feeling to these films that cannot be replicated.
The 1970s and 1980s had such a good range of detective shows (Starsky and Hutch, Rockford Files, Hart to Hart, Longstreet, Hawaii 50-0, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, McCloud, Diagnosis: Murder, Columbo, A-Team, Quincy, Airwolf, MacGyver, Cagney and Lacey, CHiPs, Knight Rider, Riptide, Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steele, T J Hooker, Moonlighting, Dragnet, Hill Street Blues, Hunter, Stingray, Jake and the Fat Man, Kojak, and Matlock). I am glad that production companies have left most of them alone, because they were iconic. I hope they leave The Princess Bride and Shawshank Redemption alone too. Series that were way popular in the past (Friends, Married…with Children, Entourage, How I Met Your Mother)were products of their times and would be politically incorrect now as straight remakes.
This is what AI said (today, anyway)
One thing that my husband and I were talking about the other day was how many different iterations there are of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. They are all different and most of them are good. There are: Sherlock’s sister (Enola Holmes), Sherlock as a hopeless alcoholic actor (Without a Clue, starring Michael Caine), present-day Sherlock (Elementary, and Sherlock), a mystery-comedy Sherlock (Holmes and Watson), an animated film (Sherlock Gnomes), Sherlock Holmes (with Robert Downey Jr), Young Sherlock. They each attract their own audience, even though they are essentially remakes.
