It’s hard to imagine a Terry Gilliam film being made by anyone else. But it looks like we’re going to have to, as plans are moving forward for a remake of his 1981 dwarf epic Time Bandits.
The project is the brainchild of Guy Collins and Michael Ryan, two former execs from Handmade Films, the production company that made the original Time Bandits. (Although they didn’t have anything to do with the original film, as they joined Handmade in 2000.) Variety is reporting that they’re looking to remake the film as a “bigscreen kids action franchise.”
Incidentally, this isn’t the first attempt to make Time Bandits a franchise. Back in the 90’s Gilliam and his co-writer on the original film, Charles McKeown, worked on a sequel which would’ve had the kids of some of the Time Bandits stealing the map and escaping through time to prevent the Supreme Being from turning off the universe at the end of the millennium. It of course never got made, but you can read a review of the script here. There was also talk last year about re-releasing the original film in 3D, which probably would’ve looked amazing with all the flying through space shots… but nothing ever came of it.
As for the remake, I don’t think anyone ever wanted to see Time Bandits for the action…you saw it for the weird, idiosyncratic storyingtelling of Terry Gilliam. Without that, you just have a bunch of dwarves running around time and space stealing things… and who’d watch that? Oh, who are we kidding? We’d watch that every day of the week.
[Variety via Bleeding Cool]