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Netflix’s ‘Rebecca’ And HBO Max’s ‘The Witches’ Both Fail ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ Test

This article is more than 3 years old.

Both remakes or re-adaptions are inferior to the previous filmed versions of their source material and offer so little that would qualify as different so as to render them redundant and irrelevant.

While nobody is offering official numbers, I’m willing to presume that the most-watched movie on HBO Max over the weekend was Robert Zemeckis’ re-adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Moreover, with Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 having vanished from the top-ten in less than a week (that’s a conversation for another day), Netflix’s NFLX re-adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is currently among their most-watched movies since Wednesday. Both films, one intended for Warner Bros. theatrical distribution and the other always intended for Netflix streaming, suffer from the same problem. They are both inferior to the previous filmed versions of their source material and offer so little that would qualify as different so as to render them redundant and irrelevant.

Anonymously directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Free Fire, High Rise), Rebecca coasts entirely on its lavish production values which recreate the novel’s 1938 setting and its three key performances. Lilly James and Armie Hammer are fine as the, uh, mismatched couple while Kristin Scott Thomas adds some “subtext-made-text” shadings to the iconic Mrs. Danvers. But the choice to keep its original time and place, along with not really making any excessive changes from either the novel or Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation (which remains the only Hitch flick to win Best Picture) renders it little more than a colorized version of what already exists. It’s not so much that it’s not as good as the 1940 version or the original novel, it offers absolutely nothing of substance (beyond being in color) to justify its existence in a world where the novel and the 1940 movie exist just a click away.

Ditto The Witches, which is (again) anonymously directed by Robert Zemeckis (I’m the weirdo who’s ride-or-die for his motion-capture toons… #justice4Beowulf) that I have to wonder (speculation alert) if he ended up in a pay-or-play deal with WB back when he was rumored to be in the running to direct The Flash. The special effects are both run-of-the-mill and an outright detraction from the gothic horror of both the Dahl novel and Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 movie. That film was a pint-sized horror show, but this brighter, campier and less overtly threatening redo feels like a “parent-approved” adaptation of a famously “dangerous” book. Anne Hathaway is having a blast, but other than her turn as the Grand High Witch (and the idea of race-swapping the main characters), there is absolutely no reason anyone would choose to watch this version when the 1990 movie exists for free as we speak on (ironically) Netflix.

There’s no automatic shame in a remake or re-adaption. Gore Verbinski’s The Ring expanded the film’s scope and scale and offered a thrilling horror-tinged adventure movie. Humphrey Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon was the third movie version of that Dashiell Hammett novel, while William Wyler’s 1959 Ben-Hur, an Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster in its day, was both an adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ and the 1925 silent movie version of that book. Ditto A Perfect Murder (a rock-solid remake of Dial M For Murder), Hitchcock’s own second stab at The Man Who Knew Too Much or even Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (which remains fascinating in a film school-experiment kinda way). While few would argue that Tim Burton’s redos of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes are “better” than the respective 1971 and 1968 adaptations, they are both wildly different from what came before.

Ditto, obviously, Apocalypse Now adapting Hearts of Darkness for the Vietnam war and Amy Heckerling updating Jane Austin’s Emma for 1990’s California to create a unique-unto-itself modern classic in Clueless. Even if you hate it, Rob Zombie’s very personal Halloween remake stands apart from the John Carpenter and Debra Hill original (which opened 42 years ago today, natch) in a way that, for example, the remake A Nightmare On Elm Street do not and the first Spider-Man reboot does not. The redundancy in terms of mimicking the plot and character beats of the Wes Craven classic renders the painfully inferior remake not just lousy but entirely irrelevant. If anyone out there is hankering for a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, would anyone choose the 2010 remake over any of the other Freddy Krueger flicks? Ditto Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man existing as a grimdark remake of Sam Raimi’s 2002 blockbuster.

Say what you will about Spider-Man 3 and Amazing Spider-Man 2, but they offered distinct Spidey-specific pleasures that didn’t feel like mere rehashes of previous Spidey flicks. The Amazing Spider-Man was green-lit back in 2010 as a cheaper (around $100 million) YA romance superhero movie, think “Twilight with webs.” But the final product was a $235 million, 140-minute Peter Parker origin story that hit most of the same notes as the first Spider-Man. In a summer surrounded by The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, it was The Inferior and Irrelevant Spider-Man. It has no reason to exist when we already have Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I’m not big on how the MCU’s Tom Holland flicks essentially turn Peter Parker into Tony Stark’s apprentice, but A) that’s a valid artistic choice and B) that absolutely separates the MCU Spider-Man movies from the Sam Raimi trilogy and the Marc Webb films. Different is key.

This is ever more important in our current VOD/streaming/DVD era, where audiences have the ability to access the previous versions of a given movie at the click of a button in high-quality at-home exhibition. Why sit through Tom Cruise’s mediocre The Mummy when you can either A) watch Edge of Tomorrow or Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol or B) watch The Mummy Returns or The Scorpion King on VOD or streaming? The differences between Stephen Summers’ swashbuckling The Mummy and the 1941 original may be night and day, but not so much the 1999 adventure and the 2017 incarnation. Filmmaking frankly hadn’t advanced that much, comparatively speaking, over the 18-year gap. And why watch Robert Zemeckis’ inferior The Witches on HBO Max for any reason other than passive curiosity when you can watch Nicolas Roeg’s superior The Witches on Netflix?  Of course, streaming counts on passive curiosity, but I digress.

Moreover, it’s hard to justify an English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (especially one that cost $90 million in 2011) when A) the original thriller was widely available on DVD and B) most overseas audiences would have to watch it dubbed or with subtitles just the same as if it were the original Swedish-language flick from 2009. Some of this goes into my “rip-off, don’t remake” philosophy, as a shameless modern update like Disturbia is going to have more relevance and a longer shelf-life than a straight-up Rear Window redo. Ditto a legacy sequel like the Craft: Legacy versus a straight remake of The Craft. You’re creating “yes, and…” content that makes the previous version more valuable and avoids direct comparisons with the previous film or adaptation. The Fast and Furious and Insidious spawned blockbuster franchises. The remakes of Point Break and Poltergeist did not.

Yes, the IP is available for the purchase and brand awareness is of prime importance, but the “perfect” older movie being remade (or revamped) is more readily available than ever before. Why go to a theater (or pay PVOD prices) to watch a remake of Memento when the original is available to rent. If you’re revamping the Men in Black franchise, then Men in Black International better be good enough to justify not just watching Men in Black or Men in Black 3 at home. Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves’ Planet of the Apes movies passed this test. Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins passed this test. Alas, recent redos of The Witches and Rebecca are, like Amazing Spider-Man, so damn similar and/or beholden to prior filmed versions that they negate their own existence. Watching Rebecca (2020) and The Witches (2020) serves only to remind you that you’d rather be watching Rebecca (1940) and The Witches (1990).

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