The remake that Tom Hanks called extraordinary: “It was a glorious thing to behold”
The industry’s ongoing obsession with cannibalising its own back catalogue for inspiration means it’s only going to get more difficult for an actor to go through their career without appearing in a remake, reboot, or sequel, although Tom Hanks has been doing it since long before it became the norm.
When he shared the screen with Dan Aykroyd in 1987’s Dragnet, Hanks was playing one of the two lead roles in the feature-length adaptation of a TV show based on a radio series that had already been rebooted for the small screen and served as the inspiration behind a pair of movies.
Since then, he’s constantly flirted with the never-ending stream of reinventions on both fronts. The ‘Burbs is getting rebooted as a TV series, which had already happened to Turner & Hooch and A League of Their Own, while Hanks also headlined a new version of The Ladykillers for the Coen brothers, starred in the English-language remake of A Man Called Ove, and made one of the worst movies of his career when he brought Gepetto into live-action in Disney’s dismal Pinocchio.
It would be reasonable to assume that some of Hanks’ best-known pictures are immune from being shuttled onto the remake train: it’s hard to imagine new iterations of Big, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Apollo 13, or Sleepless in Seattle gaining much traction, but the same can’t be said for Forrest Gump.
Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar-bothering cultural juggernaut may never get a Hollywood remake, but it got one on the other side of the world when Aamir Khan played the title character in 2022’s Hindi-language dramedy Laal Singh Chaddha. Was Forrest Gump a story that needed to be told again? Probably not, but it got the ultimate seal of approval when the original leading man gave it a wholehearted endorsement.
“I saw that: extraordinary,” he proclaimed, per Indian Express. “I think it’s a testament to how film grows on film. I think all of us have seen movies that have been incorporated into the rest of our creative process, sometimes bleakly, but sometimes very specifically. I just, I think it’s to be celebrated. It was a glorious thing to behold.”
In keeping with Forrest Gump‘s fascinating legacy, Laal Singh Chaddha wasn’t universally well-received, either. Whereas Hanks and Zemeckis’ progenitor seized the zeitgeist, dominated the box office, and overshadowed awards season, it wasn’t until the years after its release that people began turning against the film in great numbers.
On the other hand, the do-over suffered from the start. Deemed a commercial disappointment on home soil despite faring reasonably well overseas, the response to Laal Singh Chaddha was a great deal more muted than it was for Forrest Gump. Still, Hanks liked it, which was a badge of honour the filmmakers would have been proud to wear.
