Spielberg’s ‘Oldboy’ is Dead as a Doornail
by Marc Patterson
It’s the rare occasion that a film getting killed before cameras even start rolling brings a shit eating grin to my face, but today’s news from Latino Review that the Oldboy remake will not be getting the green light brought a smile to my face and a tear of satisfaction to my eye. Well, not a tear. I don’t cry. I had my tear ducts surgically removed. But I digress.
What makes this fairly significant news is that some big names were attached to this project. Namely Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. The issue at hand here came down to ownership rights that ultimately caused DreamWorks to walk away from the deal with Mandate. I’m not going to get into the tangled web of legal woes surrounding the drama because it’s rather messy and unimportant to the point of this story.
Now I’m sure that there are those who might take exception to my over-joyous reaction. After all, this project wasn’t a direct remake of Park Chan-wook’s stunning adaptation, but rather direct adaptation from the source material itself. It’s a grey area to be sure as to whether this is a true remake, or an original adaptation. But in a day and age when no great film is off limits from the greedy money hungry suits in Hollywood, its nice to see at least one title gets a stay of execution at the remake table, (and yes that’s what we’re calling it)
If we hear of any zombie-like resurrections of this project you can be sure we’ll let you know. In the meantime throw a little cheer around will ya?
