Ah, yes, in this day and age, when a studio needs a quick cash grab, they will take a proven property and redo it in all of its splendor for the spender.

There has been a lot of them lately. And when the studios announce a new “reboot” or “reimagining,” the posters online go insane.

The walls are crumbling. The earth is shaking. From the bottomless pit of Hell, a hand reaches out from the ground and grabs the negatives of the original films, so now the only version of Love Story in existence will star Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber and the famous line will become “Hey girl, love means never having to say that I love you because you’re rich.”

Calm down, take a chill pill, and listen to me.

Hollywood is not out of ideas.

You see, back in the days before many of you were ever born, movie studios were a legit business. The studios owned the theaters that played them, and every proceed that the movies made went to the studio.

Then, things started changing. First, the studio were mandated by law to sell their theaters to avoid competition, meaning they had to split the box office gross with the theaters. Then, television came, then VCRs, then computers, and then iPhones. With those inventions, people could wait until they’re out on home media instead of seeing them at the movies.

Hollywood has obviously not adapted to the ancillary markets of video, streaming, and TV. Netflix is the wave of the future, and people are able to make home theaters. This cuts into the box office gross.

It’s not that they are running out of ideas, there are still some original screenplays going around, but studios are seeing it as a risk and playing it safe with remakes of successful films.

Remakes don’t tarnish the original

Many people complain that a remake is going to take the place of the original and destroy its reputation. Does anyone remember that remake of Psycho? There, I made a counterpoint!

At least TV is original.

Yes, it has. Surprisingly, television has pretty much taken up the mantle for bringing audiences new and refreshing concepts for audiences. It’s probably because TV and film are completely different beasts. A show like Breaking Bad has made such an impact that it seems that the latest movies can not compare. Oh, well.

Before Titanic and Avatar came out, they were considered the most expensive movies ever made at that time. Many assumed that the result would be complete disaster.

Today, they are considered the highest-grossing movies ever made.

Not many people know how completely successful a film is until the box office results show, but there are bound to be many people involved with the production who inaccurately predict that the movie they made would be forgotten.

Here are a few examples:

It Happened One Night (1934)

Prior to 1934, Columbia Pictures was a rather small studio that made B-movies. So when a big movie honcho wants to punish his big contract star of the moment, they loaned them to a B-movie studio.

Thus is how Louis B. Mayer loaned his superstar Clark Gable to teach him a lesson when he wanted a raise, to make the film that put Columbia on the map and launched director Frank Capra’s career. Even his co-star Claudette Colbert had no idea it would be that successful; she told a friend that she made the worst film ever. Gable and Colbert were rewarded with Oscars.

Marty (1955)

You may have seen The Producers, and thought how in the world would someone come up with a harebrained scheme?

You may be thinking it’s fiction, but in Hollywood, there was a real Springtime for Hitler, and this scheme was concocted by none other than…Burt Lancaster!

Lancaster and a buddy named Harold Hecht produced movies for United Artists. Practically all of them were hits. Big hits. Ultimately Hecht and Lancaster saw Marty as a perfect tax write-off. A story about two loners falling in love, Lancaster allegedly claimed: “Who wants to see a movie about two ugly people?” A lot of people, apparently.

Besides, without Marty, we would never have seen a whole lot of Ernest Borgnine. Dear lord, who would have been Mermaid Man?

Rocky (1976)

The film about the ultimate underdog was sort of an underdog film itself. And the main reason was because the studio was certain no one would see a film with an unknown actor (as it is with every Hollywood movie).

United Artists was satisfied with Sylvester Stallone’s script, they weren’t too keen on casting him as the lead, because, well…he wasn’t established then. The studio actually considered James Caan, who does look the part, and Ryan O’Neal, who clearly doesn’t.

The producers stood by Stallone’s request to play Rocky Balboa, our hero, but the executives were not aware of what he looked like. So they screened one of his early films, The Lord’s of Flatbush, and he immediately knew that he was perfect.

This is “Sylvester Stallone.” Handsome, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, possibly of northern Italian stock. Ryan O’Neal, eat your heart out!

Then they met Stallone, and they were shocked…SHOCKED! (They learned that their Stallone was actually named Perry King. Ever heard of him? Didn’t think so.) But, the producers were resilient, and they complied.

But, fortunately, United Artists had one film they could bet their money on. It was Scorsese, it had Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, it was a homage to great 1940s musicals, and was destined to become a classic.

So, they decided to cut Rocky down to $1 million, and decided to have the boxing picture share the box-office grosses with the Scorsese picture so both would break even. It worked, but not in the way the studio expected it.

So, Rocky made a near-destitute actor into a big action star and launched five sequels which caused the franchise to degenerate into utter silliness until the last one. And what about Scorsese’s film New York, New York? No one remembers it outside of the hit title song that was spawned from it.

Star Wars (1977)

Speaking of Scorsese, the 1970s was a decade that launched the rise of the auteur filmmaker. Such decade also launched the careers of Spielberg, Coppola, de Palma, and many others. But the two filmmakers that came out of this era as some of the wealthiest were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Spielberg started with a shark, Lucas started with a genre that was seen as mere kids’ fodder.

Lucas made a splash with his period piece, American Graffiti, and now had a hard time convincing all the major studios to finance his homage to old-time serials. The only studio that was willing to back it was the debt-ridden 20th Century Fox, and that was because of the faith bestowed on the project by executive Alan Ladd Jr., son of Shane. The higher-ups at the studio didn’t think so; they didn’t put much effort into promoting it, and ended up selling the film as a tax shelter. The film not only saved Fox from the brink, but made science fiction an appealing genre to all ages. It also made Lucas one of the most respected and hated filmmakers in history as Star Wars fans blame him for turning the franchise into a cash-cow.

When classic films are in dire need of restoration, Hollywood studios generally turn to Robert A. Harris.

Known for the dedication of presenting films the way they should be seen, Harris received praise for resurrecting David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in 1989. Later on, Harris went on to restore Spartacus, My Fair Lady, Vertigo, and Rear Window.

In many cases, the films Harris restores unleashes a treasure trove of material that were once considered lost. Lawrence and Spartacus got several minutes of footage reinstated after their premieres at the best of the studios.

And now, in 2013, Harris is working his magic on another legendary film, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Kramer, known for his serious social commentaries, went “a little less serious” and tackled the subject of American greed in a slapstick comedy. Perhaps the greatest achievement this film is best known for is that it features roughly half of the most successful comedians of the time and put them together in a three-and-a-half-hour search for missing loot. One advertisement proclaimed that practically anyone who was ever funny is in it.

However, for the past 50 years, most people watched Mad World in a version that was roughly 45 minutes shorter than the one that initially premiered in 1963. In 1990, 20 minutes were found, but that didn’t seem like enough. Now, Harris, in conjunction with the Criterion Collection, has assembled a version running 197 minutes, the closest to the way the film was first released.

This project has been the dream of several members at the Home Theater Forum, of which Harris is a member. They too, appreciate this film so profusely that when news of this restoration finally came to be, the crowd went wild with satisfaction.

How did the process go along? T.R. Wilkinson, an advanced member of the Home Theater Forum, had a lot to say.

The release is a dream project of Criterion but any chance of fully restoring it proved to be strenuous. “All of the 70mm material has turned to magenta at this point and a good deal of it had already decomposed and warped past usability several years ago,” Wilkinson said. What remains is the resolution and the magnetic 6 track audio.”

The color was missing but fortunately, the crew had the original laserdisc version as a resource to bring color back to the frames.

“The secret is in technology developed to convert films to 3D,” said Wilkinson. The computer program takes dozens of points across the identical frame in both versions, and then warps them together into perfect alignment.”

All but three minutes were found in this reconstruction, but this is the closest we will ever see of the uncut version, and it fulfilled the dreams of all involved to release a Blu-Ray that gave the film a second life. The Criterion release will be released on January 2014.

Practically every actor has a movie they regretted making. Many try to repress the experience, while others will go out of their way to poke fun at it; it masks the feeling of vengeance you want on the people that forced the experience upon you.

But no other passion against such films was as strong was an epic production starring a now-legendary actor making his screen debut. the actor was Paul Newman, the film was Paul Newman and the Holy Grail…er…The Silver Chalice.

This 1954 diaster starred Newman as an artisan in the era of Christ; the title refers to the grail Newman creates for the Last Supper. For two-and-a-half hours Newman strutted along bizarrely constructed sets wearing a Greek “cocktail dress” (as the actor referred to his toga). Critics likened him to a poor man’s Marlon Brando. The New Yorker‘s John McCarten agreed that [Newman] delivers his lines with the emotional fervor of a Putnam Division conductor announcing local stops.”

Religious epics were all the rage back in the ’50s, but with every Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments, you had The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Silver Chalice. While the film’s director went on to say that audiences were pleased with it, the film has gone on to be considered a camp classic, most likely a result of the great lengths Newman did to ensure that the public knew how much he hated it.

And you would probably hate being in a film with such weird art direction.

Legend has it that when Newman found out that the movie was to be screened on a Los Angeles TV station, he put out a $1200 ad reading “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week.” It only got people interested in watching it.

Some other notable “failures”:

• Christopher Plummer, The Sound of Music, best known as The Sound of Mucus or S&M by said actor. Cue angry fans who will light their torches, wear Swiss Miss outfits, and raid his house
• Bill Cosby, Leonard Part 6. At his height, Cosby co-wrote and produced a sci-fi spoof for Columbia Pictures, then a subsidiary of Coca-Coca (!), and operated by an eccentric British producer who hired an untalented British crew to undertake it (said producer is said to be the one who also sabotaged Ishtar). These incidents led Cosby to urge people not to see the film on talk shows!

• Katherine Heigl, Knocked Up. Called it misogynistic, but that didn’t stop her from signing up for the “equally sexist” Ugly Truth a little while later!
• Sir Alec Guinness, Star Wars. Reportedly made a little boy cry when “Obi-Wan” told him never to watch Star Wars again.

•  Woody Allen, Manhattan. He told the producers he’d make another movie for free if they destroyed all copies of that one. A very positive example of executives not listening to its filmmakers.
• Burt Reynolds, Boogie Nights. He subsequently fired his agent.