’80s Remakes: Will Gen X Buy It?

My last post considers A.O. Scott’s column “Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis,” which posits that if pop culture is any indication of a generation’s status, (white) males of Generation X presently emerge as “losers” — men who are regretful, whiny, and tragically confined to their youth (e.g., Hot Tub Time Machine, Greenberg). How depressing.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve thought more about Scott’s conclusions, asking myself why pop culture’s Gen X males (and females, Scott implies) are apparently “stuck in an earlier phase of life, which wasn’t so great to begin with.” Sure, we download ’80s music to our iPods, and if Dirty Dancing or The Breakfast Club happens to air on TBS, then, yeah, we might watch it. But as I mentioned in my post, most of the Generation X class I know has moved on; its members think of high school/college as An Experience in their life, not The Defining Time of it. Ultimately, like Mr. Scott — a film reviewer for the freakin’ NY Times, I might add — they are successful, functioning members of society who balance their families and careers in ways that their Boomer parents sometimes failed to or were unable to do.

In brief, listening to music and occasionally watching movies from the ’70s and ’80s or reconnecting with old friends on Facebook and the like does not necessarily indicate that Generation X is living in the past. I mean, no one ever suggests that Baby Boomers are “stuck in an earlier phase of life” because they might listen to Bob Dylan, James Taylor, and The Beatles or think fondly about movies starring John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe. So why is popular culture suggesting otherwise about my generation? To answer such a question, we might consider the people who are offering up these onscreen representations as well as those who are buying into it.

First, who is presenting these images of a generation that refuses to grow up? Simply put, they are current studio heads, producers, and screenwriters, most of whom fall around age forty.[1] Okay, so why are these fortysomething progenitors of popular culture living in the past and assuming that their contemporaries do so as well? Here’s how the 44-year-old president of Columbia Pictures responds:

“There’s a fondness for that culture for those of us who came of age with it, and now we want to share it.”

Are you sure it’s not because your company as well as most Hollywood studios lacks creativity and (perhaps necessarily) fears financial failure? Similarly, Harold Zwart, the director of the upcoming remake of The Karate Kid (2010), reacts:

“The Karate Kid is me telling the story of a young man who is bullied and who has to stand up for himself, rather than me simply retelling the original movie. It’s not a remake. It’s just capitalizing on the franchise.”

Well, isn’t that refreshing? And from the looks of the trailer, sorry but, yeah, it is virtually a remake (e.g., look at the above picture of Jackie Chan; Pat Morita posed similarly with chopsticks and fly in the original). Finally, author and/commentator Peter York suggests that the 1980s are alluring for Hollywood

“because they are like a more innocent version of now; […] it was the last time when the recognizable world was all in place.”

In other words, York insinuates, the 1980s were pre-9/11, pre-terrorism, pre-global warming; there was no destruction or true fear to contend with. Well, that’s slightly exaggerated; see, for example, AIDS, the LA riots, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the war on drugs, the drought of 1988, the Chernobyl disaster, and several assassination attempts. But I digress.

Now that we know why Hollywood wants to rehash the 1980s and continue to place Generation X in the past — to share, to capitalize, to return to a supposedly simpler time — we might ask how well this will work. Or perhaps we should ask how well this has worked so far. Here’s a sampling of the remakes, rehashings, reworkings, and recreations of the movies and television shows that Generation X grew up on:

• Land of the Lost (grossed $49,392,095 USA with a budget of $100m)
• Miami Vice (grossed $100,327,090 with a budget of $135m)
• The Dukes of Hazzard (grossed $110,594,793 with budget of $50m)
• The Hulk (grossed $245,284,946 with a budget of $137m)
• The Incredible Hulk (grossed $263,427,551 with a budget of $150m)
• Starsky & Hutch (grossed $75,000,000 with a budget of $60m)
• Fame (grossed $22,452,209 USA with a budget of $25m)
• Bad News Bears (grossed $32,865,161 USA with a budget of $30m)[2]

A quick look at these numbers suggests that The Dukes of Hazzard and The Incredible Hulk, for instance, fared relatively well at the box office with the former bringing in $60m and the latter roughly $113m. However, what’s not included in these figures is the amount of money Hollywood uses for marketing (ads, trailers, Happy Meal tie-ins, etc.) and distribution (creating prints, sending prints to foreign markets, printing DVDs, etc.). Today, that cost runs somewhere between $55 to $75m or, in some cases, about the same amount as it costs to the make the entire picture.

For example, it took approximately $100m to make Land of the Lost; that includes costs for shooting, special effects, and music as well as the salaries of the producers, screenwriter(s), composer, and actors/stars like Will Ferrell. However, what is not included in the budget or the “negative cost” (literally, how much it costs to make the movie’s print negative) is another $100m to promote and distribute the movie.[3] If we take that into account, Land of the Lost presumably lost roughly $150m.[4] With this in mind, you’ll notice that the other 1980s remakes listed above do not fare much better.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule; The Brady Bunch Movie, Charlie’s Angels, and Transformers all succeeded financially. But as the LA Times reminds, “For every Charlie’s Angels hit, there’s a Land of the Lost-size flop” with which studios must contend. To that end, I wonder how many audience members, Gen Xers in particular, will pay to see the next phase of ’80s remakes. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• The Karate Kid
• Tron
• Meatballs
• Oh, God
• Magnum PI
• Arthur
• Footloose
• The A-Team
• 21 Jump Street
• Laverne and Shirley
• Poltergeist
• The Smurfs
• Overboard
• Clue
• Romancing the Stone
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Masters of the Universe

You can see above how many Gen Xers attended theatrical releases in 2009. Needless to say, the percentage is not a small one. So where were we (along with everyone else) for The Dukes of Hazzard, Miami Vice, Starsky & Hutch, and Bad News Bears? Why didn’t we want to relive our childhood movies and after-school shows? Furthermore, where will we be when The Karate Kid comes out in a couple of weeks? Footloose? The A-Team? Will we be in the theatres watching Jackie Chan “replace” Pat Morita and Jennifer Garner and Jessica Biel embody the characters of Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams? I’m not so sure. While some Millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995) seem excited about the remakes, many others online — primarily Gen Xers — do not:

• Gag me with your ’80s movie remakes, Hollywood: “Hollywood, you figure there’s a built-in audience hungry for some nostalgia. But there’s also a built-in audience ready to riot if you mess with their fondest childhood memories.”
• Stop the remake madness!: “But enough is enough. I’m not sure what the final straw was; perhaps hearing about the remake of Short Circuit or maybe finding out that J. Lo was starring in the new Overboard, but I can stay silent no longer.”
• 5 Upcoming Remakes of 80s Movies (That Must be Stopped): “Nothing from the 80s belongs in today’s world.”
• 9 Remakes That Need to be Stopped: “It’s bad enough that they ruined A Nightmare on Elm Street and Pelham 123, but now they’re messing with some serious classics.”
• 80s Movies Remakes and Why I’m Sick to Death of Them: “Every time I see another announcement of an “in production” movie, it’s another movie that I really enjoyed from my childhood getting served up as the latest bastard child of this decade.”
• Facebook Pages to “Like”: “Stop making crappy remakes of classic films! Especially 70s and 80s horror!” and “They HAVE to stop remaking 80′s movies.”
• Stop the Remake Madness: “As a child of the 80s, I got to experience all the good stuff firsthand, when it was original and fresh: the fashion, the TV shows, the movies and the music. Now as an adult, I constantly see hipsters feebly trying to emulate the 80s decade.”
• It’s The 80’s Again: Romancing The Stone & Overboard Remakes: “I can’t say that I’m excited about any of this. As a child of the 1980’s, I have fond memories of both these films.”

Oh, there are more rants, plenty more; just perform a search on Google, and see where it gets you (I stopped after scrolling down page 3). These people, mostly Gen Xers, are fed up, pissed off at Hollywood for capitalizing on their childhood and making it seem as though they consistently want to relive their past. They blame the industry’s lack of creativity and obsession with money as well as younger viewers for buying into the remakes.

Even though Hollywood executives are reportedly (re)creating these pictures to appeal “to both nostalgic parents and their progeny,” it doesn’t seem as though a large portion of their target audience is buying it, which is rather scary (for the industry anyway) when we consider the above breakdown of moviegoers. In any event, it will be interesting to see how these remakes fare financially and which demographics pay to see them theatrically. I might very well be eating these words in a few months. Who knows? Jonah Hill’s 21 Jump Street might be a major hit with Generation X moviegoers. Oh, for the love of Johnny Depp, I hope not.

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[1] For more, see “Hollywood Thinks the ’80s Are Totally Awesome,” “Why Hollywood Is Remaking the Eighties,” and “It’s the 80s All Over Again at the Cinema.”

[2] Statistics found at IMDB.com. All figures are worldwide grosses unless otherwise noted.

[3] See “The Cost of Making a Hollywood Movie” for a straightforward breakdown of how much Hollywood spent on Spiderman 2.

[4] Of course, Hollywood also earns back its money through DVD sales, TV licensing fees, theatre concessions, etc.

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