Very soon, Hollywood is going to run out of 80's films to remake and the natural course of evolution will be for execs to look at the following decade, the 1990's, for their story fuel. We mentioned a few years ago when Werner Herzog announced plans to remake Bad Lieutenant that the movie would be the very first English language movie to be remade by Hollywood from as recent a decade as the 90's (as far as we could tell) and today, we might know the second and from an unexpected source too...
The Hollywood Reporter says the 1991 ensemble comedy
Soapdish - centered around the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of a soap opera - has been picked up for a remake by Paramount, with
Ben Schwartz, the sharp comedian behind many episodes of Robot Chicken to scribe. The original starred a whole plathoa of stars such as Kevin Kline (gloriously as a washed up soap actor), Sally Fields, Elisabeth Shue, Whoopi Goldberg, Teri Hatcher and a young Robert Downey Jr. No other details about the remake are known except that Rob Reiner and also the co-producer of the original film,
Alan Greisman, are on board, but no director is set until a completed script comes in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwDSYbNSmss Remaking films from the 90's is something we hope doesn't become a precedent and the less of them we can get delivered over this decade, the better. I have never seen Soapdish and whilst I understand it is supposed to be a fine movie, it's hardly regarded as a classic that people will cry over being remade and the majority of film-goers (and probably the younger critics) won't even know the original movie exists. I guess with the economic recession and t.v. shows (especially soaps) shutting down all over the place because of a lack of the funds, a remake might make some sense as a creative endeavour but surely a film 'inspired' by Soapdish, with a different title, would have worked just as well?