Thank You American Audiences

I griped more than once on one of my blogs about how during my lifetime in general and in the last decade in particular Hollywood has, in addition to its reliance upon franchises their multitudes of installments, consistently plundered the past for its films, with remakes being so commonplace that there are more than one of them on a regular basis invading cineplexes every year.

It had gotten to the point that last weekend, two remakes of hit movies in the 1980s, Conan the Barbarian and Fright Night, actually went head-to-head. The same thing happened last year when a remake of 1984's The Karate Kid, went up againt The A-Team, a film adaptation of a popular 1980s TV series. Even though one of them won and one of them lost, the really annoying part was that yet again, Hollywood execs could crow about the power of the remake (which was especially infuriating in the case of The Karate Kid considering it had absolutely nothing to do with Karate except an almost completely non-sequitur reference). I actually liked The Karate Kid remake, but was genuinely annoyed by the producers' determination to ride on the goodwill of the original series to the extent that they weren't even willing to change to title to reflect the actual martial art practiced. With the movie having done well at the international box-office, they can now claim they were right.

Fortunately for those of us with remake fatigue, both Conan and Fright Night lost last weekend to a new movie based on a very recent book, The Help, which happened to be on its second weekend in theaters. Best of all, both of those remakes were in the format du jour, 3-D.

This makes me happy, if for no other reason than that now studio execs cannot smugly proclaim that making a hit is as easy as ripping off a movie that's a couple of decades old, or as easy as converting film into some murky, almost unwatchable state just so one can charge extra bucks.

Movies, as a non-essential good, are arguably expensive, relative to other, more important consumer goods, almost anywhere in the world, so when we shell out our money for anywhere between 100 to 120 minutes of entertainment we definitely deserve our money's worth. Who better to slam this message home to the suits in Hollywood than the people living in their own back yard? I'm pretty sure they pay more to see movies than we do over here.

So again, thank you, American audiences, for telling Hollywood that as far as remakes goes, enough is enough. Sure, they'll probably hit us with more remakes and reboots and sequels to remakes and reboots, but if nothing else, at least we won't be seeing Conan the Barbarian 2 or Fright Night 2, in 3-D or otherwise, any time soon.