5 Painfully Stupid Movie Reboot Ideas The World Nearly Got
While we can't stop our loved ones, pets, and eventually our faith in humanity from dying, one thing we can do is bring beloved movies and TV shows back into existence. Again and again. Whether it's a long-cancelled TV series or a moldering blockbuster franchise, Hollywood has managed to necromance countless properties. And while it's easy to complain about this trend, you might hold your tongue when you find out some of the crazy-ass ways those reboots almost went down ...
The Force Awakens Was Going To Open With Luke's Severed Hand Floating Through Space
The Reboot We Got:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens followed many of the beats of A New Hope: a hero living on a desert planet, a planet-destroying battle station, and an alien bar band presumably playing the intergalactic equivalent of Dave Matthews songs to the enjoyment of absolutely no one.
The opening is also rather familiar: Following the explanatory crawl, we're introduced to an enemy spaceship. In this case, a shadowy vessel fires off a stream of enemy shuttles -- which is also kind of how Look Who's Talking began.
The Insane Idea:
Instead of a spaceship, or a planet, or something that wouldn't be surprisingly horrifying, The Force Awakens was going to open with a goddamn severed hand floating through space like a revolting asteroid. The hand is a familiar one: Luke's. In fact, it was still going to be holding the lightsaber from his duel with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, probably thanks to some kind of midi-chlorian-assisted rigor mortis. If you're having a hard time picturing what that would look like, The Verge created an animated approximation:
The hand would then burn up in the atmosphere of the planet Jakku ...
... and the surviving lightsaber would land in the desert, only to be plucked up by an unseen alien. Probably Maz Kanata, the goggle-eyed old lady creature who somehow had Luke's lightsaber in her Red Lobster treasure chest of goodies in the movie proper. But wait, how the hell would this even make any sense? At the end of Empire, Luke's hand doesn't go flying into space after Vader lops it off; it falls to the bottom of Cloud City. Are they implying that one of Bespin's weirdest citizens found a severed hand and decided to launch it into the sky like the remains of Hunter S. Thompson? And then it traveled the galaxy like the Hamburger Helper glove?
The NewThe Reboot We Got:
While raging misogynists were quick to rally against a woman's right to use unlicensed nuclear accelerators to battle dead human beings who have somehow transformed into cartoonish blobs, those who actually saw 2016's Ghostbusters remake still had a whole bunch of qualms. Like the fact that the Ghostbusters casually murder Bill Murray, or how the theme song was by Fall Out Boy. So yeah, it could've been better. But the alternative was another Ghostbusters sequel written by Dan Aykroyd. Well, that could be fun, right?
The Insane Idea:
Wrong. Aykroyd's long-gestating idea was a script called Ghostbusters 3: Hellbent, in which the beloved quartet do indeed go to Hell. And not just Hell, but an alternate hell dimension version of New York where Central Park is a mine filled with "green demons" and is surrounded by "thousand-foot-high apartment buildings." Oh, and the city's called "Manhellton," presumably because the script was punched up by a team of awkward dads. And if you think that's the end of the terrible puns, boy howdy, it's time to gird your loins.
The Ghostbusters' nemesis was to be named "Lou Siffler," as in Lucifer -- a "Donald Trump-like mogul" who is literally the devil. Considering the guy has a longer IMDb page than some Baldwins, there's a realistic possibility that Trump might have played "himself." Making matters worse, Aykroyd insisted that the idea was "so solid" that he needed to make a few other Ghostbusters movies merely to ramp up to the sheer awesomeness of the Demon Trump story. Plus, he decided it would have to be computer-animated, because it would be "cheaper to produce," and more importantly, "Bill Murray won't do live-action." Or maybe he didn't want to put pants on to make a dogshit cashgrab.
So complain all you want about the recent movie, but at least we didn't get a Ghostbusters that looked like The Sims in Hell.
The Reboot We Got:
The 2010 version of A Nightmare On Elm Street was a pretty boring straight-up redo of the original movie, albeit with more violence and fewer 900 numbers.
Of course, it was produced by Michael Bay, so perhaps we should all simply be glad that Freddy Krueger didn't end up being a giant CGI troll monster who loved drinking Bud Light.
The Insane Idea:
In 2008, French filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo pitched their vision for a Nightmare On Elm Street reboot, which was surprisingly intense. According to the team, their idea "was to really use the fact that Krueger is a child molester," and to have the new gang getting terrorized by the scrotum-faced, Christmas sweater-wearing maniac be a group of actual children. Perhaps anticipating that the whole "dead guy trying to molest kids in their dreams" pitch doesn't sound super fun, the directors added that the plucky kids being haunted were straight out of an '80s Spielberg movie, like a "twisted version" of The Goonies.
The 2010 Nightmare we got didn't do that well, meaning we never got to see how Michael Bay would tackle rebooting possibly the most homoerotic horror movie of all time. But strangely enough, IT, which is essentially a "twisted version" of The Goonies, went on to make all the money in the entire world.
The Star Trek Reboot Was Almost About Kirk's Racist Ancestors
The Reboot We Got:
J.J. Abrams' cinematic take on the beloved original Star Trek series played it safe, even tethering the new film to the original's continuity with time travel and Leonard Nimoy's dulcet tones.
The Insane Idea:
Paramount's original plan for a Star Trek reboot was, uh, let's go with "different." Instead of bringing back Kirk and the gang, the script Star Trek: The Beginning took place before the original series. The movie's protagonist was Tiberius Chase, a "top-gun starfighter pilot in the United Earth Stellar Navy." That's right, the pitch for this Star Trek movie name-checks a Tom Cruise flick about erotic volleyball games (and some warfare).
In case you've been living under a rock, or living under a rock that has no WiFi, you probably know that "Tiberius" is Captain Kirk's middle name. Tiberius Chase is one of Kirk's ancestors, and he was "raised by a family with a xenophobic 'Earth first' attitude." Meaning that the rebooted Star Trek almost focused on Kirk's racist-ass relatives. That would be like rebooting the Bourne franchise, but choosing to focus on Jason Bourne's Holocaust-denying great uncle.
On an even darker note, the plot was going to involve an attack by Romulans demanding that Earth hand over any Vulcan citizens so they can "destroy the Vulcan race." Of course, once J.J. Abrams came on board, all of this was scrapped -- though you have to wonder if they considered livening up the genocide-heavy story with some sweet Beastie Boys tracks.
The Reboot We Got:
The latest attempt to remake King Kong nixes the whole "awkward Broadway show gone haywire" portion of the Kong story, focusing instead on the expedition to Skull Island ("Giant Ape Island" may have been a better name, though admittedly less mysterious). The new movie also moves the action from the 1930s into the '70s, just so they can cram a bunch of CCR tunes onto the soundtrack and make the whole thing a half-baked Vietnam allegory. But the movie's exciting opening takes place during World War II, with two soldiers (one American and one Japanese) fighting on a cliff, whereupon the shadowy figure of Kong appears. Anyone who's ever gotten into a drunken fistfight on the Universal Studios tour likely knows the feeling.
The Insane Idea:
Originally, the movie was going to open with a big "Fuck you" to the original King Kong. You know, one of the greatest movies of all time. According to director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, his pitch for Skull Island also began in WWII, with an army battling on the beaches of Skull Island. Eventually they stumble upon a big ape who looks very much like the original King Kong ... and then totally shoot him. Dead.
The idea being that "you're sitting there going, 'Wait, did they just kill King Kong? Did they kill the hero of this film?'" But right when you think the movie has murdered its star and you'll have to give all that popcorn to a hobo, the King Kong from this movie would show up, not only alive but also way bigger than the original giant ape. That's right, this movie almost picked a metaphorical dick-measuring contest with classic cinema.
Luckily, the studio responded with a terse "You can't do that," meaning that the King Kong reboot wouldn't begin with a beloved movie monster being gunned down in cold blood. At least, not this one. There's always Frankenstein.
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