Once More, With Feeling

It's shorthand journalism to define each decade by a catchphrase--the Roaring Twenties, the swingin' '60s, the Me decade '70s. Five years into the 21st century, we're in trouble. The current decade doesn't even have a nickname (the zeros? the aughts? the uh-ohs?), let alone a cultural personality. And Hollywood isn't helping. The film industry, especially in the four-month peak-viewing period called summer, rarely tries squarely addressing Zeitgeist anxieties. Instead it ransacks its attic for sequels, spin-offs and, this year, remakes. You don't look forward to many of the new season's blockbuster hopefuls. You look backward.

For studios, of course, it's about the money. "The remake, the sequel of an established success, the something familiar," says Jason Squire, editor of The Movie Business Book, "is a way to more readily sell the movie to a global audience." But that global audience is us. Studios wouldn't spend so much money making and marketing these familiar products if we weren't buying. Summer has long been our most escapist season, when we kick sand in reality's sour face and swim in the fantasy that movie magic makes so persuasive. What has changed in the past few years is that instead of escaping into novelty (that shark! that spaceship! that dinosaur!), we now flee to the familiar. Perhaps it's because the repetition of a fairy tale--or one told from a different angle--validates an underlying message: that in a world full of knotty menace, someone who cares will always be there to tell us the same story and rock us into sweet dreams.

So here, this summer, come a dozen or more remakes. That word makes producers uneasy. They say an old film has been rethought or reimagined. We say if you're not exploiting the old brand name, give your film another title. Otherwise, it's a remake.

Front runner in the summer sweepstakes is War of the Worlds, for which Steven Spielberg has added his patented parent-and-imperiled-child theme to H.G. Wells' alien-invasion novel, memorably filmed in 1953. Tim Burton has imposed his lovable eccentricity on the Roald Dahl children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp replacing Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. In 1974, Burt Reynolds starred as the football-playing con in The Longest Yard; now he supports Adam Sandler and Chris Rock in their replay. And if your memory of Herbie, the Disney Love Bug, is as rusty as the fender of a '68 Volkswagen, strap yourself in (next to Lindsay Lohan) for Herbie: Fully Loaded.

Believing that people will pay $9 for what they used to get for free, moviemakers are updating and inflating old TV shows--from Bewitched (Nicole Kidman) to The Honeymooners, with Cedric the Entertainer in the Ralph Kramden role. "We try to stay true to the main theme," says Cedric, "which is this guy dreaming of a bigger life for his family and always doing it by some kind of get-rich-quick scheme." Want to see what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been doing onscreen? Catch them as rival government hit men in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, suggested by the 1996 CBS sitcom with Scott Bakula and Maria Bello. A remake of The Bad News Bears was nearly inevitable: that one was three movies and a TV series.