First among sequels

Time to reflect on another year’s Hollywood output. And beneath the smart oak veneer of the Oscar lists lurks the usual compressed sawdust of remakes, adaptations and (above all) sequels. Sadly, I haven’t managed to see Hangover 2, Transformers 3 or Mission Impossible 4: so my comments will be generalised, taking in films from earlier years. But nothing much changes.

Generally, I don’t get the point of remakes. I can understand that you remake a foreign-language film in English to spare your audience the trouble of mumbling as they read the subtitles aloud to themselves. And before anyone starts, no, The Lion King is not a rip-off of a Japanese original. Disney says so, and the American courts agree. So I’m not going to argue. 

(Osamu Tezuka, 1965)

But to remake The Ladykillers or Psycho? What's the point? Why not re-release the original? If I want to come up with a great painting, I’m not going to try to update The Mona Lisa.

Or you could have another go at a film that didn’t quite work first time around. The Twelve Chairs had a great plot and some fine moments, but somehow the whole thing fell flat. An idea like that deserves a second chance. And Judge Dredd could be watchable, but needs a lead actor who’s prepared to wear the helmet at all times, as the comic-book character does. (Maybe it needs an actor recognisable from his chin alone, as Kirk Douglas was. Any ideas?)

Ah yes, Judge Dredd. I’ve nothing against adaptations as such. The idea of turning Romeo and Juliet into a ballet seems barmy (“Hey, this would be good if we could just get rid of all the words!”) – but it works. Monty Python had fun imagining Wuthering Heights in semaphore, or the smoke-signal version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And I’ve read some novels that would make perfectly good haiku, or toilet paper.

Perhaps my disappointment is in how persistently film-makers go to the back catalogue of novels, sixties TV series, or fairground rides. Or pen-and-paper games (Battleship). What next: Noughts and Crosses of the Caribbean? Doesn't anyone have ideas of their own any more? (See my earlier posting: Harry Potter and the Search Engine.) (And check out Remake: redux part 2 – scroll down to the second cartoon – on http://christopolisillustration.wordpress.com/2010/03.)

And then there are the sequels. These days people seem to actively expect sequels. It is alleged that The Madness of King George was so-called because The Madness of George III would have confused Americans who hadn’t seen the first two. What would today’s filmgoers make of Henry V? Malcolm X? Catch-22? Fahrenheit 451?

Sequels are such big business that we have invented new words for follow-ups differently related to the original: such as prequel, for a film set earlier than the original story. The idea isn’t new: El Cid dies at the end of his story, so people wanting to write another story about him were short of options. But the word is new – along with simulquel, threequel, and (ouch) squeakquel.

Again, I don’t object to sequels as such. But it’s the sheer number of them, compared with original output. Wikipedia says 2011 saw twenty-eight sequels made, and I expect that's just in Hollywood. Of the top ten grossest films, excuse me, the ten top-grossing films of 2011, eight are sequels and another is already called "Part 1". If Never-Ending Story truly was never-ending (and it felt like it), why did we need a second one?