I realize that Hollywood wants to make as much money as possible, but why do they have to do it remaking movies that were already good to begin with?  Shouldn’t Hollywood take a movie that had a good concept, but was executed poorly, and remake that? In other words, stop taking movies like Psycho or The Thing and trying to update them, they are already as good as they are going to get. Instead get those movies that should have been good and remake them.  For your reading pleasure, I have compiled a small list of movies that they should remake.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

It seems that many times when Hollywood tries to adapt a graphic novel, they fail miserably (excluding Watchmen and Kick-Ass). Here you had a wonderful graphic novel taking many of the great heroes of literature :Captain Nemo, Alan Quartermain, Mina Harker, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll (and in the movie Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray) , and placing them together to defeat arguably the greatest villain in literature, Professor Moriarty. It sounds like a recipe for a great film, unfortunately, both the director and the studio got in the way. The studio spent all their money on Sean Connery, leaving no real money to get any other recognizable actors. Then they added Tom Sawyer to appeal to American audiences, by the time they finished, the movie was simply a mess. How about we go back, not worry about appealing to the mass audience, much like Kick-ass and Watchmen did, and make an amazing movie?

The Last Airbender

The less I say about this attempted adaptation of the Anime series, the better. Let’s ignore the fact the M. Night Shamalyan’s films have progressively gotten worse; how does someone take such rich source material and screw it up to the point where it becomes basically unrecognizable? I don’t know why Hollywood continues to take either video games or television shows with great story lines, and then decide those story lines aren’t good enough, and then create their own subpar story lines, thus making a terrible movie. In the case of The Last Airbender , it would have been nice if the story writers were actually familiar with the show to begin with. If someone could go back, and actually adapt the story lines from the show, we might have a good movie on our hands.

Masters of the Universe

Now, I am ashamed to admit that I loved this movie growing up, even with all its flaws. Some of you may remember that I mentioned this film in a previous list (List of terrible childhood films). The problem here is that the original He-man series really wasn’t that good. I mean seriously, He-man ran around in his underwear for the majority of the show. But they could have made a decent film based in that world. It’s the story of a prince who fights to free his land from the evil tyranny of Skeletor, an evil sorcerer. Meanwhile, Prince Adam is aided by the Sorceress who gave him his special sword and the power of the Castle Greyskull, which allows him to become He-man. I say make it rated R, have him use his sword to tear through people, and we might have a hit on our hands.

Eragon

This was a book that caught on like wildfire, for a while it was the talk of the fantasy fiction world. Now we know one thing about fantasy fiction, it is incredibly hard to translate to the screen (I know, I know, unless you’re Peter Jackson) remember Dungeons and Dragons or In the Name of the King? So, the odds were already stacked against this movie. But the filmmakers proceeded to destroy this movie in every way possible; from the no name cast, to the barely passable special effects. Let’s hope that one day someone will look back and make this book into a film that is worthy of the source material.

Spawn

Spawn was one of the great comic book series to come out of the nineties. Not only that, it had a great animated series on HBO. So, when it was announced that there was going to be movie, one might have thought “How can it go wrong?” Apparently it can when you come up with a halfway decent plot, then in the film’s climatic battle, you make the special effects so bad that no one can figure out what is going on.

If the powers that be had simply followed the comic or the HBO series and made a gritty story with the antihero Spawn at the center of it, we could have had one of the better superhero films of the era. Hopefully, one day someone will.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I probably am a bit biased when it comes to this movie simply because this is one of my favorite novels of all time. The American production did a decent job of making into a film, but lost much of the subtle humor of the novel. Yet it is possible to capture this humor, the British series did it perfectly. I hesitate to say this, but in order to make this a decent film, it has to be made by the British. They seem to be the only group who can capture that subtle and random humor that the novel is chock full of. The other problem with this film was the love story between Arthur and Trillian that they tried to force. Arthur shouldn’t get the girl at the end, he is destined to have things go wrong. He is the eternal loser.

Waterworld

This is one of the most famous flops in movie history, but it’s actually not that bad; it wasn’t anywhere near as good as it could have been. It went greatly over budget simply because they were building giant floating cities. But the plot was still interesting. I think that the idea of a world in which there is not dry land is far more topical today, with all of our fears of global warming. This still could be a great film, but it will definitely take the right director and right casting this time.