Fantastic Island

Scott Hardie | February 11, 2020
Fantasy Island has been remade as a horror movie. I don't especially like horror, so the movie doesn't look like my cup of tea, but I love the idea of taking an existing media property and recasting it in a new genre to see what new things can be done with it. That approach has to be better than another boring straight remake.

Can you think of any movies or shows (or for that matter, books or games or other media) that could work well if remade in a different genre?

Erik Bates | February 14, 2020
[hidden by request]

Steve West | February 14, 2020
I read somewhere that Ryan Reynolds wants to remake Clue. I'd like to see that as a serious mystery in the Agatha Christie mold as opposed to a fairly lame comedy.

Scott Hardie | February 18, 2020
Erik, good share. Those genre-swapping trailers are fun. "Shining" and "Scary Mary" are two others that I really like.

Steve, good suggestion! I liked the original Clue movie just fine, but I could definitely see it working well with a much more serious tone. I was thinking about Sonic the Hedgehog's box office success, and the correlation between most video game movies being financial flops and being unserious about their source material, and it occurred to me that most tabletop game movies like Battleship and Ouija and Dungeons & Dragons also don't seem to have much respect for their source material. I can think of a few board games that would work well as movies (Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is practically Pandemic), and Clue is good enough to warrant another take.

Could Cheers work as a serious drama about a bunch of codependent alcoholics who insult each other all day to soothe their own pain and have to come to terms with the death of their beloved bartender Coach? What if it was a story "told by" Diane Chambers after she escaped from that bar and started her career as a Hollywood screenwriter?

Some classics have room to deal with contemporary topics. A serious modern take on The Andy Griffith Show could portray the scourge of Fentanyl in rural America. An I Love Lucy could deal with immigration enforcement and family separation as Ricky faces deportation. Gilligan's Island could dramatize climate change. The Beverly Hillbillies, income inequality. The Honeymooners, domestic abuse. Ugh, just typing this makes me depressed. These shows are meant to be light entertainment; I'm dragging them down with heavy real-world problems.

I read somewhere that Lost started life as a scripted take on Survivor. ABC wanted to do a drama about stranded survivors of a wreck forming an island society, but nobody could think of a plot hook to drive the story forward until someone added science fiction elements. So, how about reversing that: Could Twin Peaks work as a straightforward murder mystery and small-town drama, without any supernatural material or Lynchian strangeness?