Q & As About 'Star Wars': Would audiences be interested if Disney-Lucasfilm remade Star Wars Episodes IV, V and VI with modern film-making techniques?

-
© 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Would audiences be interested if Disney-Lucasfilm remade Star Wars Episodes IV, V and VI with modern film-making techniques?
Judging from the reaction of many Star Wars fans to the changes that franchise creator and founder/retired CEO of Lucasfilm, George Lucas, made when he decided to improve 1970s-era special effects shots that he felt fell short of his vision with late 1990s-era CGI effects for the 20th Anniversary Special Editions, I’d say…”No.”
The Star Wars Trilogy is already one of the most “tinkered with” movie series in the history of the industry. Since 1977, Star Wars alone has undergone many adjustments, ranging from necessary fixes to its audio track, accidental deletion of scenes and re-insertion of said scenes, a 1981 title change from Star Wars to Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, a tweak that was first previewed in 1979 when Ballantine Books published Carol Titleman’s The Art of Star Wars and officially retconned into the movie itself for its Summer 1981 theatrical re-release.

I’m not going to get into a debate over whether Lucas should have limited the changes to a few cosmetic retouches here and there that don’t change how the characters behave (the infamous “Han Shot First” issue); suffice it to say that many fans are still unhappy with the Special Edition re-edits 22 years after Lucas said that they were the definitive version of the Original Trilogy.

Another reason why Lucasfilm and its corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, are not interested in remaking the Classic Trilogy is its status as a culturally-significant contribution to cinema.
I mean, seriously. Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy would probably rather be tossed into the Death Star’s trash compactor before greenlighting remakes of the franchise’s Crown Jewels, especially the first film (Star Wars). That movie was selected as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” film in 1989 for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry upon its creation.
So, no. Considering that there are millions of moviegoers who love the Original Trilogy 42 years after the premiere of Star Wars, I can assure you that audiences are not interested in such a remake.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more