That’s a sarcastic headline, by the way. It’s not at all surprising that someone out there wants to remake Time Bandits. We’ve seen remakes proposes for just about everything — and the more fervent its fanbase is, the more Hollywood longs to exploit it.
According to Variety, former Handmade Film executives Guy Collins and Michael Ryan are in talks with another Hollywood producer to reboot Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. The article is predictably scarce on details, but they aim to make it “a big screen kid’s action franchise.”
Nothing good can come of this. Time Bandits has that dark little edge of weirdness and danger that was peculiar to 1980s children’s films, which is why they hold up, and the bland milquetoast stuff of the 1990s and 2000s does not. I mean, that ending! You’d never get away with that today.
The sad thing is that I think there’s a lot of us that probably would have loved more Time Bandits back in the day — it had a raw and open world that could have been explored in more stories — but we were content to have one film. It worked. To see it (possibly) watered down and spun out into silliness is just sad.
Sad. But not at all surprising.
6 comments
Why bother? Reboot something shit like the Goonies instead.
What’s next Brazil, the rom-com?
We need to start a Nerd Army who hides out in Hollywood and kneecaps any studio executive who attempts to “reboot” or “reimagine” a beloved film from the past that is perfect on its own. Just imagine: a Producer is walking down some shi-shi street in Bel Air, talking on his phone, and says, “So, we’re thinking of bringing back E.T. as a kid-friendly action comedy, but with, you know, an edge…” Suddenly, pasty, overweight ninjas appear from behind a bush and blow out his knees with lead pipes painted up like lightsabers. Yeah. That would be cool.
Hey Hollywood, no thanks.
They’ve been trying to do this Time Bandits-as-Franchise thing for over a decade now if not two.
It’s like that Bladerunner sequel/reboot/rebootquel/sidequel that gets announced every 3 or 4 years.
Good luck getting that 200 mill budget guys. Pity you don’t have a cinematic genius on board to do all the hard work, or it’s some kind of cheap-as-dirt horror movie property you’re trying to get traction with.
Talent. It’s a bitch.
Lets do it.
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