Fox Is So Desperate, It's Remaking 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun'

Like a lot of people, about ten years ago I wondered what 20th Century Fox would call itself when a new century hit. The company stuck with the name, a tried and true brand to be sure. But what I didn't know then was the reason it remained 20th Century Fox was because it would be so goddamned committed to just regurgitating pop culture from the last 100 years in the 21st century. The Pink Panther, The Omen, Cheaper by the Dozen, Fat Albert, Garfield, Alvin & the Chipmunks, and The Day the Earth Stood Still have all had Fox facelifts, and in the near future The A-Team, Predator, and Marmaduke of all things will be coming our way. We just reported that Fox wants to do something with Alien, and now there's the sad, sad case of a Girls Just Want to Have Fun remake. It won't work. And it won't work for the same reason you can't do Reality Bites or Saturday Night Fever: It's borne out of its own time. These movies are postcards from their specific decades and you can't just transplant that because you've got a hole in your release schedule. As bad as Girls Just Want to Have Fun is, at least it was timely and somewhat organic and meaningful to the audience. I couldn't care about the specific remake either way, but the trend is disturbing to me. There are tons of movies from the 1980s that aren't "80s movies," just as there are songs from that decade that you don't immediately think you're going to hear on an '80s weekend-themed radio station. Why not remake those? In this case, you've got a movie that exists in the first place only because of a very '80s song; it was not intended to be the sort of thing you can revisit 25 years later. And honestly, is the concept behind Girls Just Want to Have Fun so groundbreaking that Fox wouldn't be better off inventing something new?

Comments

[KXB]

I don't believe Pink Panther was Fox's crime against cinema (I endured it and noticed the MGM logo roaring at the beginning of that disgrace), but I get what you mean; and MARMADUKE? WTF???

[Get The Big Picture]

Yeah, I see now that Fox only distributed it in foreign markets. So only people in other countries should shake their fist at them for that one.