Despite reporting on remakes of classic films for something like five years now, it never ceases to stun me when news hits about the latest one to undergo castration. Shouldn’t we be remaking the films that didn’t work in order to make them better? No, but that fanbase of suckers calls to the studios, because they know that as much as we hate it we’ll be first in line to see what they did to our beloved films!
Next up for the fire is Videodrome. Variety is reporting that Universal is looking to remake the film from a script by Ehren Kruger, who you most probably don’t know from such films as Blood and Chocolate, The Skeleton Key, The Brothers Grimm, and Reindeer Games. Oh, and Scream 3. Daniel Bobker will co-write and produce. Cronenberg has nothing to do with it.
The film will be a bit different from the original. Hold on tight, here’s the line that will get the purists screaming-
The new picture will modernize the concept, infuse it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller.
While I actually agree that the original concept wouldn’t work- what with analog technology being essentially obsolete nowadays- there’s something about the physical nature of it that made Videodrome work so goddamn well.
If you’ve somehow missed out on the original Cronenberg film, shame on you. In it James Woods stars as a dirty TV exec who decides to program all kinds of real-life, violent content in order to gain viewers. Turns out that there’s a market for snuff films! The only problem is its effect on viewers. It is a flawed masterpiece but it’s a cult classic for a reason, and definitely up there in my favorite of his films (probably topped only by The Fly and Dead Ringers).
Will the remake completely abandon the body horror element in lieu of a straight thriller? There’s no director or actors (or script!) just yet, but it will be interesting to see the route they take with this, at the very least.