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In general if you remake a classic movie, it will never be anywhere as good as the original. Robocop, Total Recall, Just Go with It, King Kong, Arthur, Red Dawn, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Day the Earth Stood Still, & Manchurian Candidate are all examples of subpar remakes of classic movies.
However, if a remake is based on an obscure (or foreign) movie that the audience doesn't know about, the film is usually good. Departed, Ocean's Eleven, & Vanilla Sky are all good remakes because the source material was obscure.
So, if you're going to remake a classic, you should pull out all the stops and swing for the fences. Casting should be focused on finding the funniest comedians in Hollywood: Zach Galifinakas, Charlie Day, Jonah Hill, Aziz Ansari.
Instead, this casting was driven purely by political motivations, so they got Kristen Wiig (who is very funny), Melissa McCarthy (who can be funny but has a tendency to resort to cheap fat jokes) and then a bunch of scrubs from SNL.
I could be surprised, but I expect this to be very meh.
This is a very good point.
To give a further example...
12 Monkeys was inspired by a French science fiction film. Now that film is beautiful in its own right. But 12 Monkeys did something very different with it. And even if you don't think much of 12 Monkeys, I think you have to agree it's at least trying something. It's expanding on something.
This is just replacing men with women. I'm sure the jokes will be new.
But this just feels completely inorganic.
Maybe some of this is what prior generations went through. But it seems odd to me that there's demand for this. I mean--I still appreciate old movies. Movies that "pre-date" me. Can people not do that anymore? We need a female version of Ghostbusters?
Is it really the case that what we need, more than these talents working on something altogether new, is an updated version of something with 4 men?
WHAT. THE. HELL.
What's really incredible about this is that whatever empowerment results from women taking over the roles is taken back by the fact that these women weren't clever enough to originate the idea to begin with. And let's be clear about this--this isn't some seed of an idea that they planted and watered and nurtured into something else. Look at that picture above. This is a ****ing rip-off.