By Dominique Tassell
While there’s a plethora of articles online declaring that Hollywood has “run out of ideas”, why are we so quick to demonise updating classics for a modern audience?
In recent years, we’ve seen plenty of remakes, sequels, and adaptations of older novels, but a good portion of the time this new media is far better than its source material.
West Side Story updated the movie by having actual Latinx actors playing Latinx characters, fleshing out the backgrounds of its characters, featuring a nonbinary actor, and touching on racism within the Puerto Rican community.
Remaking Little Women is a generational tradition at this point, and gets updated it for that generation’s values.
Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaption took this a step further, fleshing out the characters far more than they ever have been. Amy March in particular benefited from this and is now one of the relatable female characters in modern media.
More recent works benefit from this revision too.
Panic by Lauren Oliver was originally published in 2014, and a series based on the novel was released on Amazon Prime in 2021.
The novel follows the teenagers of a “dead-end town” called Carp, who play a game named Panic “because it was summer, and there was nothing else to do”. The prize money is seemingly just a bonus.
While a lot remained the same, Oliver (who adapted the novel for the screen), made some fairly drastic changes including changing the driving motivation of her main character.
Heather Nill, her main character, entered the game of panic in the novel to win back an ex-boyfriend. In the TV series, she enters the game because her mother steals the mother she’s been saving over the years for college.
The love interest in the TV series is also completely different to the love interest in the books, with the TV’s borne out of a minor character in the novel.
While the novel doesn’t seem that old, publishing a novel in 2022 where your main character is driven almost entirely by goals centred around a male just wouldn’t cut it. Honestly, it’s boring.
The motivations given to Heather in the TV series have far more depth, and the stakes in general are far more compelling.
It could be argued that the plethora of sequels in recent years, like the new High School Music TV series or Top Gun movie, is purely driven by the somewhat guaranteed money it will earn.
But if they’re updating older media to suit a modern audience, or simply making the plot better, is it really a bad thing?
We’ve seen older media like novels by Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton described as problematic in recent years, due to them containing views from the era in which they were made that we no longer hold. Wouldn’t it be better to update those novels for modern audiences rather than getting rid of them altogether?
That being said, this revision only works when you’re improving your work. JK Rowling, here’s looking at you. Please stop. None of the new stuff makes sense.
