10 Movies Delayed To "Get It Right" (That Still Got It Wrong)
8. Red Dawn - Switching Villains Isn't Enough To Save A Non-starter Remake
It’s fair to say that the world didn’t really need a remake of Big Wednesday helmer John Milius’ “small town besieged by unlikely commie invasion” eighties hit Red Dawn. The original flick had a pretty spotty production history of its own, having begun its life as an ardently anti-war film “sort of like Lord of the Flies”, according to one producer, only to be transformed into a shamelessly jingoistic and xenophobic tract praising the US military and scaremongering against the nefarious Red russkies.
But that transformation is nothing compared to the disastrous remake, shot in 2009 with a cast of then-up-and-coming stars such as Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson, and future Thor Chris Hemsworth. Shelved until 2012, the film had to be altered to remove any references to the invading Chinese army who the heroes are fighting, since US-China relations had since cooled off and the plot point would have come across as needless provocation.
Instead viewers got a murky, muddled mess of a flick wherein North Korea were the baddies—that is, the small handful of viewers who actually sat through this bloated, humourless flop.