Yeah yeah yeah, the headline is an exercise in sarcasm. But it’s also an object lesson about remakes: they don’t erase the original. While you may have seen The Bride, the awful 1985 remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, you likely don’t think of it all that often. Which means that the original classic remains untouched.
So the only reason to get up in arms about a new remake, coming from Universal and Imagine, is that it will be bad, not that it will be a bad remake. And considering it comes from Neil Burger, I suspect it will be bad. Now, if it came from Neil Hamburger I would have a lot of faith in it.
Universal and Imagine have been trying to get this remake off the ground for years, and now they’ve signed Burger to write and direct the film. You may remember him from the pretty shitty The Illusionist, the other magician movie from the year that brought us The Prestige. You probably don’t remember him from last year’s Iraq movie, The Lucky Ones.
It’s not that I think Burger is bad, it’s that I haven’t been convinced he’s good. Nobody knows his take on the material; the previous writers had created a modern day version of the story, but Burger won’t be using their work.
via the Hollywood Reporter