Last we checked in on David Cronenberg – or Bronenberg, as I call him at our weekly poker games – he was taking a big, stinky dump on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the people who love those movies because we’re stupid for liking comic books, or something to that effect. Meanwhile, his new film Cosmopolis started opening on a platform release last Friday, which means that you’ll be able to see it in your city by November. Hopefully those two things have kept him distracted from the fact that his 1983 science fiction thriller Videodrome is being remade.
Universal Pictures already brought in Ehren Kruger to pen the new version, and that’s exciting, because his writing credits include Reindeer Games and the last two Transformers films. You should see the size of the vein building in my forehead right now. And to top it all off, a director has been chosen in Adam Berg, who makes commercials.
Berg won the Film Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for his Carousel ad for Philips, and has helmed numerous other commercials and short films.
When Kruger and [producer Daniel] Bobker set it up at Universal, they planned to modernize the concept, infusing it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller. (Via Deadline)
To recap: the guy who wrote the horrendous Reindeer Games is teaming up with his co-producer from the universally-loathed Dream House, and they hired the guy who made this Philips commercial to direct…
I haven’t watched Videodrome since high school, but it is a f*cked up movie. It definitely qualifies as a cult classic, so I’m confident in saying that there’s absolutely no reason on this planet to remake it other than to generate buzz by pissing people off. So congrats, guys, mission accomplished.