The abysmal 2013 movie Steven Spielberg dropped out of directing: “You can’t cop out”
Some movies aren’t supposed to exist, but Hollywood persists with them anyway. One of those pointless pictures was almost directed by Steven Spielberg, who ultimately dodged a bullet by dropping out.
You don’t become the highest-grossing director in cinema history by making nothing but original films, as sad as it sounds. Every single one of the filmmakers on that list has helmed at least one sequel, if not several, with the occasional reboot or remake thrown in for good measure.
Spielberg knows a thing or two about putting a fresh coat of paint on an existing title from both sides of the camera: as well as his dizzying spin on West Side Story, Always was a remake of A Guy Named Joe, and as a producer, he’s backed Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple, The Mask of Zorro, the Coens’ True Grit, and more.
To paraphrase one of the characters from one of his greatest movies, the industry has become so preoccupied with whether or not they could remake every film with a bit of name value, it didn’t stop to think if it should, but would the Oldboy remake have been quite as crap if it had one of the all-time greats at the helm?
Maybe, maybe not, and it’s not as if Spike Lee is some jobbing director-for-hire, either. Actually, he was, for the first and last time in his career, when he signed on to put his stamp on Park Chan-wook’s seminal 2003 revenge thriller, which lives on as the only entry in his filmography that isn’t a Spike Lee joint.
When the rumblings first began about transporting the action from Korea to the United States, the project attracted two of the biggest names in the business, with Spielberg circling the director’s chair and Will Smith eying the leading role, but as frequently tends to be the case when people remake things, the latter claimed that it wouldn’t be a remake, even though it was.
“Not the film, though,” Smith clarified. “It’s the original source material. There’s the original comics of Oldboy that they made the first film from. And that’s what we’re working from, not an adaptation of the film.” Call if whatever you want, but if it’s called Oldboy, then it sounds an awful lot like a remake of Oldboy.
Screenwriter Mark Protosevich was hired to pen the script, and he shared how “Steven’s son was a big fan of the original, and he said to his dad, ‘You can’t cop out on this, it has to be raw, disturbing, and you have to keep the ending.'” His screenplay was ultimately the one used by Lee, and while it kept the ending, at no point did Oldboy V2.0 come close to justifying its existence.
Ultimately, Spielberg backed away over a rights issue, putting the movie on ice for years. When it was defrosted, the number of people asking for it to exist remained stuck at zero, with Lee stepping in to direct a cataclysmic box office failure that he wished he’d never bothered making.
