15 Planned Horror Film Remakes That Thankfully Never Happened
12. They Live
In 2010 it was revealed that yet another one of John Carpenter's cult classics, The Thing, would be getting a remake. Many of Carpenter's films, including Halloween, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13 and (soon to be) Escape From New York have all been remade, to varying degrees of success. Carpenter himself, however, has also remade/reimagined films (The Thing, Village of the Dammed) again to varying degrees of success. So fair's fair and all that. The news coming out about the remake of They Live at the time, however, did not give fans much hope. One of the biggest sins was that they were going to do away with the sunglasses element. Then it was reported in 2011 that producer Eric Newman (who had worked on the reboot of The Thing) had brought in Let Me In writer-director Matt Reeves to write and direct an adaptation of They Live's source material, Ray Nelson's short story 8 0'Clock in the Morning. Carpenter himself had a pragmatic approach to the remakes of his films:
There are two kinds of remakes of my films the good kind, and the bad kind. They just did a prequel to The Thing. Thats the bad kind because I dont have any rights in it, so they dont pay me. If they do Escape from New York or They Live, or any of the other movies that I wrote and have a more primal position in, I get a check. Something that Ive wanted to do all my life is to make money doing nothing.
Perhaps he was just confident that he knew they wouldn't be bettered.
