Is this true ?

http://ew.com/tv/2017/08/04/ka..._entertainmentweekly

It's true. There was even a small bidding war over it among Netflix, Amazon and YouTube Red.

Why would you redo that excellent movie? It was well-cast and had just the right director to tell the story. I'm still waiting for Hollywood to do "The Lone Ranger" justice.

Looks more like a very late sequel than a redo.

But the Karate Kid was remade already. That awful dreck with Will Smith's son set in Japan or someplace. I tried to watch it and wound up fast forwarding through it.

Movies like the Karate Kid came out at a time when they were really enjoyable. Filmmaking has changed, the world is more jaded and many of these old movies seem dated now. We still like them because we remember when we first saw them and they were our favorites. That doesn't mean they should be recreated every few years. Its the original that may have worked in its time, the copy has to better for newer audiences. Most of the time remakes can't touch the originals, even when they have bigger budgets and current stars.

Why is that you think?

I think the world became jaded by the late 1960's. It really isn't any more world-weary now. We just don't remember how much it was back then. "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" said the human race isn't going to survive and even our close evolutionary relatives wouldn't run things any better because violent tendencies run deep. It doesn't get any more cynical than that.

"The Karate Kid" wasn't just good for its time. It was a good story with well-acted, well-written characters progressing realistically across the film. The reason it's a bad idea to redo a good movie is that the remake is always missing true emotional ingredients that come out of the story and its characters. It wasn't about a boy learning karate to get back at bullies. It was about how he learned how he could live his life from a great teacher.

You can make "The Karate Kid" a girl and have the setting be San Francisco or Dallas, but if the director concentrates on just the fight sequences or is stuck with miscast actors and a script that strains just to match or spoof certain shots, the heart of the story is going to be lost or clumsily revealed. The audience is going to feel that.

Of course, even an original film is often based on a novel. The thing that usually happens is that it's a great story but the script ends up bearing little resemblance to it. Yes, the novel is too long to turn into a 2-hour movie so some changes are unavoidable but the movies that end up working are those that stuck close to the good storytelling that was already there. I think of "The Hunt for Red October" and "Three Days of the Condor" - great movies that were great reads. In the case of the latter, you got an idea that changes were made because the novel was "Six Days of the Condor."

A bigger budget with the A-listers of the time aren't going to float a script that simply "updates" the story with a twist or two. It has to draw emotion from the audience. I have no idea why it was decided that the current relaunch of "Star Trek" had to have a "Wrath of Khan" remake as its second entry in the series. I can't say "Into Darkness" was a bad movie but were they already running out of ideas to follow up a good first movie? We didn't feel a sense of loss when Kirk died because we knew how he could be brought back to life. The death of Spock near the end of "Wrath of Khan" did have impact on the audience. There was no handy device for a miraculous revival and the reality of it was compounded by the hero's funeral scene.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:
Looks more like a very late sequel than a redo.

But the Karate Kid was remade already. That awful dreck with Will Smith's son set in Japan or someplace. I tried to watch it and wound up fast forwarding through it.

Movies like the Karate Kid came out at a time when they were really enjoyable. Filmmaking has changed, the world is more jaded and many of these old movies seem dated now. We still like them because we remember when we first saw them and they were our favorites. That doesn't mean they should be recreated every few years. Its the original that may have worked in its time, the copy has to better for newer audiences. Most of the time remakes can't touch the originals, even when they have bigger budgets and current stars.

Why is that you think?

Not to disagree with the discussion against all of this re-make madness. To be fair The Karate Kid was mostly a re-make of Rocky. It even had the same director. Probably the most "go to" formula in Hollywood.

The Karate Kid remake just made me feel sorry for all the kids with acting ability who auditioned but were overlooked due to Hollywood nepotism.