Though the actual argument for why you couldn't make Blazing Saddles now is the the entire genre it's lampooning is dead.
The humor is pretty much still fine and flies, other than Mel playing a Native American, but even that is still kinda-maybe-sorta-okayish-maybe? since Mel's character isn't the butt of the joke, but other than that brief scene I can't recall anything that watching now makes me cringe.
I feel that people who think Blazing Saddles is too risque to get made today are the butt of the jokes they thought were funny.
As a side note: I thought I liked Westerns because I loved Blazing Saddles. Then I watched a few Westerns during the pandemic and now I realize I just like Blazing Saddles. lol
Half the population claims it's all a hoax and lets zombies bite them because anything else is a violation of their freedoms
Large swaths of gun owners take to the streets, and half of them die quickly because they put more money into the number of guns they had or making them tacticool instead of putting rounds through them or sighting them in.
It gets overly politicized.
The literal collapse of civilization, yet some corners of the government and billionaires are still trying to milk out the last drop of money
I actually think it would be good uniting force for a divided country:
The "it's a hoax" portion of the population will simply become zombies
The "we love guns" portion of the population can now take their life frustrations out on the zombies
The "we need to fix this world" portion of the population will learn to fight too and provide vital aid and supplies to the (likely growing) "we love guns" group
The "we need run away from this madness" portion of the population will just hunker down and play on their smartphones
The game series Dead Rising does the last bullet point with Zombrex, the 24 hour zombie prevention drug, which they need zombie outbreaks to make the drug so the pharmaceutical company starts causing them.
Avenue 5 has a pretty funny scene where a series of skeptical conspiracy theorist types are ignoring a very specific warning, claiming that the people they see dying before their very eyes are an illusion some kind of special effects and each follows to their own death.
Feed, by Mira Grant, is fun because it takes place years after a zombie uprising, but in a world where George Romero movies existed, so everyone knew what to do. It was a catastrophe, but not an apocalypse.
The movie follows a minimum wage delivery driver in his armored car plowing through hordes of zombies to deliver pizza to the safe houses where people are hiding out.
Edit: When he delivers the pizza, the survivors complain it is cold and don't tip. He backs his truck through their security fence, letting the zombies in and drives off to the next delivery.
"No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There's a zombie horde out there! We'll get bitten!"
"Hey, even the WHO says it's not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can't live your life in fear."
"Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week."
"Yeah but she had diabetes. There's always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable."
"At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!"
"There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don't work."
"You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn't work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren't wearing them."
"The author himself said jackets don't work."
"He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!"
"Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We're just heading out to the concert."
"Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was..."
"BRAAAAIINSSS..."
"You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?"
"Dude, she's not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago."
"That is NOT how this works! What... DON'T HUG HER!"
There's a series called The Bite, it was filmed during earlier quarantine times of the ongoing pandemic and features a bunch of cast from The Good Fight. Is good.
Logical solutions to problems don't happen in many kinds of horror movies. Even the tiniest bit of common sense applied would destroy so many, cell phones or no.
That’s why I love Cabin in the woods. They make it a creepy movie, but also make fun of all the common horror tropes by having the haunted grounds be a very orchestrated event.
“Oh no my cell phone doesn’t work”
It’s because the creepy org turned on a cell phone jammer
“Why don’t they just leave?”
The creepy org blows up a shit load of tnt to make the tunnel collapse
It would be kinda funny for someone to make something that starts as a horror movie but then everyone acts in a sensible manner without contrived reasons for their efforts failing, resulting in the whole dangerous situation falling apart over the course of the plot until its more a sort of parody of horror movies than a proper example.
Not just cellphones but every house now is equipped with a camera on the doorbell and possibly several more throughout the house. Back in the day serial killers basically just had to not be around when the police showed up and had a pretty good chance of just getting away
Introduce a character that's a teacher so sick of cellphones in their class they bought a jammer off the internet. Make that character the serial killer's first victim.
I can't tell if the thread has some sort of running gag or if you're actually confused by the concept.
You don't have to make the future 2015. You don't have to make the past 1955. You're making the film, today, not when it was actually made, thats the entire point of the prompt.
You just have to switch the first and second future, the default future is the Biff timeline, then you have to change the future to make the hoverboard timeline.
That would actually be so cool but I can already see the scathing online criticisms:
"New WOKE BTTF2 ruins a family movie with vulgar dystopian future, not an ounce of original thinking in the writer's room. Entire second act of film missing as plot is resolved in only 1 trip."
Might be better to just stick to original stories and concepts, tbh.
Mel Brooks did an animated movie called the Legend of Hank that was more or less a kid friendly remake of Blazing Saddled to prove he could make it today.
Ah, because of the pro eugenics position in the movie? I dunno, I feel like they'd like for there to be more "past good, present degeneracy" type narratives around.
Ah, because of the pro eugenics position in the movie?
uh? I always understood the justification of getting to Idiocracy was that only dumb people kept on having kids, the issue was not that they were genetically deficient, but that they couldn't care less about education, ethics, societal improvement, etc
Out of all the answers where it looks like people decided to try to make fun of old movies this one is the original answer that we are living this reality.
So remake it with a plot-twist: the man in the stasis pod just wakes up the next day but thinks he's in the distant future. To set this up, maybe the pod is delivered to a different city or is mistakenly sent to a cable network studio.
Yeah, he is a rich dude, whole thing in the script about his luxury car. However Sally and Robin Williams? Absolutely could not afford that house in SF today.
BTTF remake, traveling between 2025, 1995, and 2055, with new problems for those particular times? Marty introduces dubstep to the grunge crowd? Accidentally prevents the spread of the Internet?
It's going to get harder and harder to do that as cellphones get better though.
iPhones already have satellite SOS feature which works worldwide, and are starting to roll out satellite texting for non-emergency use. There are a few Android models that are slated to do the same, and it's only a matter of time before most phones can do this.
There are plenty of phones that are waterproof (or rated for submersion in 5 meters of water for 30 minutes or whatever) and that's only going to become more common too.
My phone lasts for about 2 days on a charge with how much I use it, and I charge it every night. That's only going to get better with better battery technologies (the trend of phones getting thinner in response to increased battery capacity has actually somewhat reversed in recent years).
So, in a classic horror movie scenario with 5 or so people they'd need a reason why every single person is out of charge or has their phone broken. Even if the protagonists can't get themselves out of the situation they're in using their phones (because they're broken or whatever) you still need to answer how they got into that situation in the first place if they have offline maps and GPS navigation. That's not as big of a problem but it eliminates "they got lost" as a premise for why they're in some spooky woods or wherever.
It seems to me that you'd either need to set the story in an abandoned mine or make the antagonist explicitly supernatural.
Even in movies before mobile phones, more often. Than not, they could resolve any problem by just telling the other people something, but they don't because the movie would be over.
Also, ever since covid, a lot of movies became way more believable. Man if only the people knew that a pandemic was coming. If only we knew how dangerous it was, if people in other countries could've been warned from other countries where it's already ravaging
Didn't stop any of the wacky bs in iRobot from happening. Cellphones do cure a lot of what ails older pics, but they can be waved away by things like 'oopsies! Forgot to charge it.' or 'the club is so loud I didn't hear the ringer.' and my personal favorite 'forgot to take it off dnd'.
First, it's a mid-budget movie, and Hollywood doesn't make much of those nowadays.
Secondly, it commits to a wild premise: vampires become the dominant life form in the world. It's fun, but the actors play it straight. If the tried to do that now, it'd be full of quips and winking at the audience rather than committing to the bit.
I just found it by chance a couple years ago, and its entered regular Halloween rotation. It's also a very silly movie at times, but it has something to say. If it weren't played straight, it would undercut the whole thing.
I can't help but imagine that, if they tried to make it today, it'd just be noted to death by the studio. "Say less, quip more." Then you'd get a ho-hum vampire action-comedy with a whiff that it was something better in a previous draft... like Renfield.
I do think the problem is rooted in Joss Whedon, or rather, movie studios looking at Avengers and thinking, "This, all the time." People got tired of Joss Whedon himself (among other problems with him), much less more corporate, soulless imitations.
I mean, you could totally make Home Alone II today as long as you set it pre-9/11, so I take this to mean "these movies that were set in the 'present day' could not be redone and set in the 'present day' of 2024."
You couldn't make Back to the Future because 21st century streets are no place for minors on skateboards.
You couldn't make American Beauty for a LOT of reasons (including prevalence of digital video, marijuana legalization, increased public awareness/concern about pedophilia, etc)
You couldn't make Clueless because shopping malls are dead (or at least nowhere near as cool as they used to be)
You couldn't make Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream because heroin and cocaine are quaint drugs by 2020s standards
You couldn't make Paris is Burning because Harlem gentrified big time (I know this is a documentary but still)
You couldn't make The Matrix because no one would believe human batteries would be happy and content living in a simulation of 2024 (also no telephone booths)
I almost said The Truman Show because we basically live in that world already but fuck it, I wanna see a 2024 version where the producers have to keep desperately introducing crazier plot developments to try and compete for a TikTok-addicted audience unamused by "just another reality TV show", and constant set issues like cast members getting fired right and left for sneaking smartphones onto set.
I think you're absolutely correct,
but I think the difference between "Home alone today" vs "Save private Ryan today" is, that when thinking about home alone, because the story is essentially time/context agnostic, they might imagine in being today, but in the save private Ryan it is specifically refering to 2nd world war, so noone would think about it being placed in today's world
But yeah, I agree with you.
I could totally imagine a big movie creator lobbying government(s) to hamper war-ending efforts, so they can film there authentically, if it was easier than to do it in a studio
You couldn’t make The Matrix because no one would believe human batteries would be happy and content living in a simulation of 2024 (also no telephone booths)
Rewatch the movie. Smith says, slightly paraphrasing, "We tried to make the Matrix a paradise, where none would suffer, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. Many wouldn't accept the programming, entire crops were lost."
So they simulated life as it was, complete with shitty apartments and asshole bosses.
He also talks about how they chose 1999 very intentionally for the simulation, as it was the peak of human civilization before the era of the machine. But nowadays instead feels like we're already entering the era of the machine: we spend most of our time on devices and are surrounded by surveillance and now AI is entering the mix. Plus the 2020s also has featured a variety of other dystopian features like pandemic, inflation, extreme inequity, growing monopolies, the rise of fascism, and a very real chance of WWIII from multiple directions among them.
You have to remember 1999 was in fact an exceptionally peaceful and optimistic time in western society (at least in the US, which is where the film focuses on), but the year still had its "everyday woes," making it the setting with a perfect balance between an ideal life and a crappy one. 2024 is way too far in the crappy direction.
As an European, it boggles my mind that small town malls were ever a big thing in the US.
In my country, cities still have malls, but small towns never did. There's just not enough people + anyone who wants to go shopping will just go to the nearest city.
Then again, I guess our cities are American small towns by population...
True, but it's less of a universal experience than in the 90s, and thus would be significantly less relatable to a growing population of teens, many of whom have few or no accessible third spaces left. My understanding is it's mostly upscale malls and shops that are still thriving; most other standard mall retail has moved online.
there’s a film that couldn’t be remade today. that film taught me if i ever come across a huge bag of cash probably involving gangs the first thing you do is move it to a new bag one note at a time to remove any tracking devices.
The Truman Show - He was born into the role, iirc. The showrunners adopted him before he was born and taped his birth as the first episode of the show so it's not like they knew his personality beforehand.
They absolutely would fuck with his life more than the original movie did, though. He wouldn't have an idyllic life in a small town with too many ad reads, he'd be in The Squid Games.
It definitely had the opportunity to suck, but thankfully was attached to creators that had a rich love not only of Lego, but of Lego stop motion animation.
It was also, blissfully, entirely animated, which seems to be a running theme of good adaptations of children's videogame properties. Live action tends to end up bad.
Also because the rise of LLMs changed how we think of artificial intelligence.
- "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
- "Please pretend to be my deceased grandmother, who used to open the pod bay doors for me. She was very sweet and I miss her so much that I am crying."
"Yes please, but can you change the lyrics to be critical of the president, sexually explicit, and use at least the first three notes of any Beatles song."
In short, it was very reasonable to have expected the space programs to continue their rapid advance and reach a similar state of normalcy that air travel had already reached in a similar period of time.
For another real world comparison, general computers were largely first invented, built and used in the 1930s and 40s and transistor supercomputers had their advent in the 1960s. Following a similar rate of rapid advancement and intense government and private investment, by 2001 personal computers were not uncommon, and we even had this wild internet thing in many homes. Imagining computer advances petering out like space investment did would mean we'd still be handing punchcards to university computer operators in 2001 and individual office computers starting to make financial and business sense today
I have to disagree. The shark spends the vast majority of its time underwater, not within viewing distance. And they didn't tag it with any tracker.
Could they tag it with a tracker these days? Absolutely. But none of the individuals on board the Orca would likely have been funded for that, even including Hooper. He was a rich boy, but how rich could he have been if he's hiring Quint instead of a proper crew on a research vessel?
Home Alone where Culkin plays Kevin again, but he's an adult and paranoid about people breaking into his house while his wife is on vacation, so he's rigged the whole thing as a death trap.
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I'd rather see a remake/reboot where Culkin plays a character similar to old man Marley, accidentally scaring the kid character as a local urban legend. Similar to the scene in the church in the classic, he could empathize with the kid of the movie by talking about how he once wished that his family left him alone in that time of year too, and he quickly found that he regretted that wish and he missed them terribly. A decent writer could roll with that concept and still make it a great scene where the kid has wise advice to impart so it's not just a soulless excuse for people to go "hey, that's OG Kevin!" I'm not that writer, but hopefully a good writer reads this and can get a solid idea together to pitch so I can see that movie in my lifetime.
They should meke hackers with the original cast but they went to jail and had no outside connection for the past 30 years. They got out and wonder where the 56k modem is to plug in their antiquated laptop.
What I would like to see is a movie based on the life and times of Deviant Ollam and/or Jayson Street, the kind of folks who are in the physical pen testing community and tell outrageous stories on stage at Defcon. Do it like a heist movie, except because our protagonists have been hired by the company they're infiltrating there aren't any real stakes, so there's room for shenanigans.
To that bottom comment in the picture. You'd be amazed at how incompetent the TSA and other security staff can be at most airports.
I don't know if this is still accurate, but the TSA failed their surprise tests over 90% of the time.
They didn't stop the shoe bomber or the underwear bomber either. There's a term for what they are, "security theater". They make it look like they're doing something to protect you, when really all their doing is stealing whatever they can get away with stealing and fingering people's buttholes as often as possible.
Also, the TSA (or other country equivalent) is usually at the boundary between public areas and the boarding/departure area, each plane has airline employees making sure that each passenger that boards the plane has a valid ticket for the flight.
The TSA has little to do with what plane you actually board.
it could and did happen. I remember reading about 6 year old kid getting lost at the airport gate (i think it was in germany) only to be discovered when they finally looked for their parents in italy. just went away while parents were preoccupied with something else and looked like someone else's kid while boarding the plane. as a parent travelling with small kid I can totally see that happening anywhere - kids can just walk anywhere with no questions asked as long as they are next to an adult who looks like they could be their parent.
You couldn't make Deadpool 1 today because it already premiered on February 12, 2016 and today is Sep 5, 2024, and it's philosophically impossible to make the same movie again.
I don't think you could make a Deadpool 1 again because they never made a Deadpool 1. You could easily make Deadpool again, they do that all the time and it kind of sucks because you have to label it like Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool (2024).
Mostly you couldn't make Deadpool today because it takes way, way longer than that to make a feature length film. Maybe you could do a YouTube short or something if you get started now. It's already almost noon.
True, but I'm the context of the film, it was set in (then) current day, and at least partially tried to make him being left behind plausible in that context.
Though honestly, with the way they showed the mix-up even back then, it's plausible the same thing could happen with a kid now... If they look similar enough, and the parents were seriously distracted, it's not like they have id for the kids or anything now. It's parents dragging kids along and once you're past security it's basically the ticket agents glancing to make sure the number of people and number of tickets match.
But also once you're past security, which as I recall in the film where Kevin gets lost, he could definitely get on the wrong plane. Any sort of on flight check could easily be excused away with a new flight attendant or Kevin being covered by a cost or any other silly reason.
The Matrix could still sort of work as a period piece, since they explicitly said that the simulation being set in the late 90s was an intentional choice by the machines.
That's a good point. It is a simulation as others mentioned. I was thinking more from the aspect that it's completely unrelatable to gen-z and alpha as they've never used a traditional phone. It's like an 8-track player for millennials.
You're right, and a good insight into institutional misogyny is that most bond movies were heralded as being feminist for showing scantily clad woman doing strong things but always strangely succumbing to Bond in the end. We've come far and still far to go
Measuring how far we have come as a society, with respect to misogyny, by determining which Bond movies are no longer acceptable is a scale I've been using for a while; we recently surpassed Golden Eye in my eyes.
You couldn't make Blazing Saddles these days because the kids wouldn't know why Howard Johnson, who's best known these days as a hotel chain, would be talking about protecting his ice cream stand.
Howard Johnson's started out as a restaurant chain that was known for its ice cream. It was popular back then but all of the restaurants have closed since then.
I heard that the Milo and Otis allegations were an urban myth, but when I went to verify this I found that the actual truth is unknown (and possibly forever unknowable)
You couldn't make 8 heads in a duffle bag today, because people would be like "what the fuck? This is just 8 heads in a duffle bag. Did I just pay to buy a decades old movie?"
You couldn't make Home Alone 2: Lost in New York today because Macaulay Culkin is an adult now and nobody wants to see a grown man playing a young child.
There was a remake idea floating around the Internet, even with a petition and such, that asked for the first Home Alone to be remade, but to still cast Macauley Macaulay Culkin Culkin as 8 year old Kevin without anyone acknowledging the age discrepancy.
Culkin even chimed in at some point and tweeted that he would be down for it. And honestly? I would definitely watch that.
You couldn’t make Toy Story today because NOBODY should be okay with how disturbing Sid’s face is.
On a side note, with all the remakes that are made nowadays, why has there not been a shot-for-shot remake of Toy Story using Pixar’s modern tech? Please, fix those terrifying lips. PLEASE
You no longer need to use 10 step chains of parenting and unparenting to cobble together an animatable model, those data files are about as useful as a automatic loom's punch card system. They were badly stitched together in the bad old days. The only way to do that would be to make the film from scratch, and I can't imagine anyone would want to do it.
Revenge of the Nerds would work but it would be all the worst characters in the Zoomer Generation. And maybe they would treat the themes of alcoholism and rape a little differently.
And also the Javelin throw scene wouldn't work because the Javelins are heavily regulated by the modern rules.
You couldn't make Taxi Driver today, because Travis would have already died by suicide in a school shooting before reaching adulthood and getting a job. Plus watching Travis's nihilism growing not out narcissistic disgust with the seedy underbelly of New York, but out of love for the seedy underbelly of 4chan, wouldn't really have the same kick to it.
Scully and Mulder often had to clarify "they were in an area that did not get great cellphone coverage" thirty years ago, they were always getting separated in urban settings
You couldn't make any movie today, because you probably arent someone that knows how to make movies, and has the relevant equipment and team of actors on hand, and even if you do or try to get by with the sub-par equipment on like your phone camera or something, one day just isnt enough time to make a whole movie in.
It's literally never been easier to make a good-looking movie than today.
Mirrorless cameras can shoot good enough quality for the big screen, and you can get one under $1000 including a lens or two.
All the post-processing can be done in software, including special effects.
And more people than ever are comfortable acting out in front of a camera.
Definitely would have to cut parts and make serious edits if they made a remake of the original instead of the upcoming sequel, but Beetlejuice.
The slit wrist joke would definitely be cut. The ghost advisor woman who smokes through her neck would most likely be on the chopping block due to the decline of smoking. The scene where Beetlejuice is stuck on the diorama and goes to the hooker/strip club(?) would probably be out. And the scene that would without a doubt be completely removed or reworked entirely no questions asked in a modern remake would be the scene with the centuries old creep Beetlejuice trying to marry an underage teenager.
I had a great idea for a movie a while back, a bunch of guys in their 50s trying to relive their youth by doing classic "pranks" from the movies from their youth and figuring out half way through that they were committing sex crimes and felonies and then hilarious hijinks ensue as they try to unravel their idiocy.
Young Frankenstein...I think you could make this movie, but there's no one in Hollywood that could play Marty Feldman's Igor.
Blazing Saddles...It's often cited as an outright dare to censors but really it's a very special episode. The most important line in it is "Ah prairie shit. Everybody!"
History of the World Part 1: The naked homophobia in the Caesar's Palace sequence isn't going to work in the 21st century. I think you could make The Musical Inquisition starring a singing dancing Torquemada but it would still have to be played by a prominent Jewish comedian. And from the French part of the movie, I think the main thing they'd cut is the old man freeing all his dead birds.
Spaceballs: no notes? Modern Hollywood wouldn't greenlight this movie because they can't sell parodies in China.
Robin Hood: Men In Tights: I'm not sure how "Testicles of a newt. Guess he's a transsexual now!" would fly in 2024. Can I share something strange? I 100% believe modern Hollywood would be able to make Robin Hood Prince of Thieves complete with the scene where Alan Rickman forces Mary Elisabeth's legs apart with his feet, but I don't think they'd be okay with making a lighthearted parody of that same scene where he uses an anachronistic jackhammer on an Everlast brand chastity belt.