8 Movie Remakes That Pissed Off The Original Creators
"They should all die in hell." Bit of an overreaction, perhaps?
The process of producing a remake is identical to the way that every other movie gets made. A studio sends a bunch of filmmakers off to write, shoot and edit something together, and hopefully, there's a lucrative box-office run waiting at the end of it all.
But an element of the remake process that we don't often think about is how the original creators are involved - or whether they're even involved at all.
While there are exceptions, in most cases... they aren't. It's normally the studios who hold the rights to the property, and thus, they can remake it as they please, without having to consult the filmmakers or actors who worked on the original piece.
And this can lead to certain creatives feeling quite annoyed when their movies are remade, lashing out at the people who are involved in the new version, or firing shots directly at the studios themselves.
Imagine if you slaved away on a movie for two or three years, then one day, it was remade, and you didn't have any control over the end result. That's the position these people found themselves in, and they weren't too chuffed about it - not one bit.
8. Fame
Alan Parker's beloved 1980 musical won two Oscars, spawned multiple TV shows, and inspired countless stage productions. With such a successful franchise, a movie remake was somewhat inevitable, and 2009 was the year that it finally happened.
But this new version didn't exactly have Parker's blessing, despite the team behind the remake claiming otherwise. In fact, Parker felt like the original Fame was his baby, and likened the experience of having the movie remade to being "mugged".
Chatting with The Telegraph after the remake's opening weekend, the director pointed fingers at the producers for failing to contact him before making it, while also calling the project "dreadful". He then complained that the studio could just take his original work and mess with it however they wanted, admitting that he found this process "galling":
"Because the copyright is owned by the studio, as with almost all American feature films, they can do a remake like this. It's extremely galling. There is no other area of the arts where you can do that."
Parker even added that he was considering pursuing legal action over the remake's use of the Fame logo, claiming that distributor MGM did not have the rights to use it.