Dan Aykroyd gives blessing for Female Blues Brothers movie

[CelluloidPal]

Originally Posted by octagon

I don't know about you but I'm very glad Steven Moffat took the lazy route and rode the coat tails of someone else's IP because his Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes stuff has been pretty awesome.

I'm also glad Universal is still cranking out Bond movies and Disney has revived Star Wars. Sure, that too reeks of outright laziness, I guess but the movies are pretty fun so...

There are countless examples of people riding somebody else's coattails and producing awesome entertainment.

Though I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Dan Aykroyd and The Blues Brothers.

Ohhhhh, wait, are you talking about the fact that he and Belushi performed all those songs they didn't write?

I dunno, I kind of liked that.

You know damn well that there's a difference between a creative adaptation of someone's work and taking said work to hop on a "trendy" bandwagon and coming off as a hack and that's not a guarantee for even half decent entertainment.

BTW, Universal is not making Bond films and Disney running the Star Wars brand into the ground to turn an easy dollar isn't anything worth writing home about and from what I've read here, the quality of those new Star Wars movies aren't exactly stellar to say the least.

Originally Posted by Shingster

But the property has to be one where the gender-flip makes sense. How many famous modern-day, iconic (in a mainstream sense) female blues artists are out there to star in this film? Loads of wonderful female blues artists over the years, but the vast majority are only known to serious blues fans. Soul Sisters is certainly a much more suitable property but then you've moved away from Blues Brothers and into "why bother linking it to the BB original" territory.

This was also the problem with Ghostbusters, it was a "lightning in a bottle" franchise created by a bunch of men with a very masculine world view, and Hollywood thought a female-centric remake aimed primarily at women was going to be well received with no backlash at all? Anyone with half a brain could see that coming!

Loads of properties from the 70s and 80s you can reboot and replace men with women, but you've got to apply common sense, and it seems nobody in Hollywood is really doing that. Something like Roadhouse for instance could work with a badass female lead because the fanbase isn't so rabid and it doesn't have that big, big iconic status, plus it's a property that's ripe for gender flippery because the original was basically a western-reworking with machismo ramped up to 11 that didn't take itself too seriously and a talented scriptwriter could easily subvert that.

Funny that you brought up Road House. It was going to be remade a few years ago with Ronda Rousey in the Dalton role to be directed by Nick Cassevettes. That didn't go very well because the fan base for the original film isn't as small as you think and has in fact has become an iconic cult film, in part, because the filmmakers did take this seriously and became what it was. Remaking that film and try to subvert it was an uphill battle that no one was going to win.