 Starring: Jude Law, Jane Krakowski, Marisa Tomei, Susan Sarandon
Director: Charles Shyer
Year Of Release: 2004
Plot: Alfie is a Brit living abroad in New York who seems to have it all. He’s young, single, has a succession of beautiful women on his arm and no responsibilities. However while he believes he’s not hurting anybody, he has a tendency to leave pain and confusion in his wake and begins to learn that his actions have consequences, whether he wants them to or not. |
Really doing justice to all the issues surrounding remakes would require a book rather than an article, but what I want to look at today is why Hollywood is obsessed with doing remakes in the first place. Alfie is a bit of an odd one, because being made 40 years after the original, many of the usual arguments for why Hollywood would pursue a remake don’t hold up. So why did they do it, and what are the other reasons that make the studios constantly recycle themselves?
The first reason is rather simple. If a story has been successful before, there’s a decent chance it’ll be successful again. Studios buy an awful lot of script that are in their early stages, spending millions developing them and yet only a few ever get to the stage where they’re confident enough to actually make the film. With a remake you can bypass that, taking the rights to a story that’s already proven itself, and giving it another go. It’s for this reason that studios are constantly scouring the globe looking for quality foreign language films, because even though they normally screw it up when they remake them, they already have a pre-made template that shows it can work if done well, and so it seems like a fairly safe bet.
Allied to that is that if a story is already known and has been successful, it’s likely to have an in-built audience. Just as with sequels and adaptations of books, you already have a mass of people interested in what a new film version can offer. Even those who haven’t seen the original are likely to have heard of it, and so a remake already has brand awareness that it can build on. Studios are well aware that it’s not enough to have a decent movie, you also need to be able to market it, and if people have already heard of something because there’s been a previous version, it’s an enormous boost to your marketing efforts. With a remake you don’t need to spend ages just getting people to be aware of a film and the basics of what it’s about, because they already heard all that from their familiarity the original (even if they haven’t seen the first version, many will still know basically what it is and what it’s about).
It’s for this reason that so many horror remakes have come along in recent years. Getting your movie noticed is very difficult and takes an awful lot of money. With things like horror movies it’s even more difficult because they’re normally low budget and don’t have much of a marketing budget. However something as simple as having the name Friday The 13th or Halloween makes getting your new movie noticed an awful lot easier. Even those who were too young to have seen the original will have heard of it, and you have a much better chance of being able to use your marketing money to get this new generation to go and see your film, rather than spending most of that cash just to make them aware of the brand.
On this level films are no different to any other brands – people like things they’ve already heard of. You could put a cola drink on the shelf that tasted exactly like Coke, but most people would still buy Coke because they’ve already heard of it. While some like to talk about people knowing and trusting a brand, and buying it because they believe in its quality and know they like it, it’s actually far more basic than that. If you have a choice between a brand you’ve heard of and one you haven’t, most people will choose the one they’ve heard of, irrespective of whether they’ve ever bought it before or know anything about it. Awareness is a powerful tool.
The studios know this and that with more and more people, particularly teens, deciding to go to the cinema before they decide what to watch, they know a film with a title people have heard of and which already comes with positive connotations because of the original, is more likely to be chosen than a film they haven’t really heard much about and isn’t based on something that’s gone before. It’s by no means a guarantee to success, but it is probably true that most remakes (but not all) will make more money simply because of the title it has, than if they’d changed the name and pretended it was a completely new film. (Many of these arguments also hold up for book adaptations and things like Transformers that are based on other things people have already heard of).
However there’s sometimes another reason why studios do remakes, which is that a particular star, director or producer really wants to do it. Hollywood is a town absolutely beholden to talent, and is extremely keen to please the people who seem to have box office power. That said, in the past couple of years they’ve tried to reign things in after realising the power had shifted too far towards the top actors and that they were making endless movies that had no chance at commercial success just to keep the talent happy (stars like Sandra Bullock nearly imploded their own careers by being given pretty much complete control of the entire process, from originating scripts to editing, without proper studio oversight, with the result that not only did the studios lose a lot of money, but they also lessened the box office power of the stars they were so keen to court).
In 2009 an Alfie remake probably wouldn’t have got made, but in 2004 Jude Law was riding high on the success of the likes of AI, Road To Perdition and The Talented Mr Ripley, and at that time stars pretty much got to do whatever they wanted, and Law wanted to be Michael Caine. As a result Paramount said okay to an Alfie remake. After all, it wouldn’t cost hundreds of millions, would keep Law happy and there was always the chance it would become a hit.
In the end it barely made a dent in the box office, losing a fair amount of cash, partly because while it kept Law happy, it didn’t really abide by the other rules of remakes. The original Alfie is over 40-years-old and so doesn’t really have the brand or story awareness, pretty much putting you back at square one in getting you film noticed in the marketplace, which the Alfie remake failed at.
In fact while it’s not a bad movie, my opinion is that this is one case where the film might have actually done better under another name. However the reasons why some remakes work and others don’t – which is down to more than just whether a film is good or not – will have to wait for a later Movie-A-Day article.
TIM ISAAC
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