12 Least Successful Recastings Of Iconic Film Characters

8. Jackie Earl Haley - Freddie Kreuger

Film: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) Replacing: Robert Englund The phrase 'horror remake' is one that should naturally fill you with dread and despair, given the shed-load of awful American remakes to perfectly good or great foreign-language horror movies in the last 15-20 years. But this feeling of dread becomes all the more amplified when Michael Bay's name is mentioned alongside. When Bay's Platinum Dunes production company sank its rampantly cynical claws into Wes Craven's Elm Street saga, we all knew it wasn't going to be pretty. But one of its most underwhelming aspects was the casting of Jackie Earl Haley as the legendary Freddy Kreuger. By the time Bay came to develop the Nightmare remake, the Elm Street series had been in hibernation for some time. It had ended on something of a high with the post-modern New Nightmare in 1994, notwithstanding the passable Freddy vs. Jason crossover in 2003. When Bay and director Samuel Bayer came on board, they wanted to move the series back to its roots, disposing of many of the more comedic elements that Freddy gained in the later sequels. While original actor Robert Englund approved of the remake, he declined to reprise his iconic role. Jackie Earl Haley won the role after producer Toby Emmerich saw his Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children. Even by the standards of horror remakes, A Nightmare on Elm Street is shockingly terrible. While the original was a smart, interesting film about American suburbia, parental guilt and the boundaries between dreams and reality, the remake is a nasty, retrograde, meat-heated slasher with no well-written characters and no brains. Where Robert Englund brought dark humour and a Shakespearean presence, Haley is one-dimensionally mean: there's no subtlety to his performance as he growls all his lines and is upstaged by the grissly make-up. If they absolutely had to remake the film, keeping Englund would have been the only smart option.