That’s a sarcastic headline, by the way. It’s not at all surprising that someone out there wants to remake Time Bandits. We’ve seen remakes proposes for just about everything — and the more fervent its fanbase is, the more Hollywood longs to exploit it.
According to Variety, former Handmade Film executives Guy Collins and Michael Ryan are in talks with another Hollywood producer to reboot Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. The article is predictably scarce on details, but they aim to make it “a big screen kid’s action franchise.”
Nothing good can come of this. Time Bandits has that dark little edge of weirdness and danger that was peculiar to 1980s children’s films, which is why they hold up, and the bland milquetoast stuff of the 1990s and 2000s does not. I mean, that ending! You’d never get away with that today.
The sad thing is that I think there’s a lot of us that probably would have loved more Time Bandits back in the day — it had a raw and open world that could have been explored in more stories — but we were content to have one film. It worked. To see it (possibly) watered down and spun out into silliness is just sad.
Sad. But not at all surprising.