For a remake to attract a new audience, in a new era, it needs to offer new enticements. Remaking an old film or television series can involve a bigger budget, higher production values, special effects and a contemporary setting; for this book, I focus on sex. Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes focuses on stories that have already been filmed—sometimes many times previously—that are made afresh with new approaches to sex. While sex in this context refers to inserted or increased erotic content, my discussion is broader than this, also incorporating an analysis of new approaches to gender and sexuality, feminist reimaginings and queer retellings as well as an exploration of material made modern through less explicit presentations.
This book is split into three sections. This Introduction unpacks the key concepts and provides an overview of material that will (and won’t) be covered in this volume. I outline how I use the term remake, and present my rationale for focusing on such media. I outline debates around originality, introduce the key role of celebrity in “sexier” depictions, and briefly discuss the integral role of sex in media marketing.
Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of sex-swaps. Titles like Ocean’s 8 (2018) and Ghostbusters (2016) are high-profile examples of films that have been remade with sex-swapped casts: their predecessors—Ocean’s 11 (1960; 2011) and Ghostbusters (1984)—boasted predominantly male casts; the remakes were modernized through putting women at the helm. The act of sex-swapping on screen dates back to the earliest days of cinema, and while male-to-female swaps have received most attention, the reverse also sometimes transpires where films that originally had female casts, or a female protagonist, are remade with men: the comedy-drama How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), for example, focused on three single women seeking millionaire husbands and was remade for television as How to Marry a Billionaire (2000) with three single men seeking rich wives. The politics of sex-swaps are examined and explanations for the recent surge of such productions are proposed, including to reflect the zeitgeist, to create a star vehicle, to grow an audience, and to insert some politics. Politics is further probed in a discussion of feminist remakes. The notion of what feminism means in the context of filmmaking is examined and its manifestation in remaking is investigated through a range of modern remake presentations including moderated misogyny, inserted misandry, positive portrayals of women, progressive gender roles, the female gaze, and the casting of feminist actresses. Chapter 2 also examines the backlash against such films, as well as the production of postfeminist and anti-feminist remakes.
Chapter 3 examines the use of erotic content and overt displays of sex and sexuality in remaking. I investigate the discourse around steamier and raunchier remakes and explore the notion of sexiness as subjective. Three central ways that films are remade as sexier are outlined: the casting of sexy talent, the inclusion of more nudity, and the depiction of more sex. The rationales for increased sexiness that I propose include to create buzz around a film, to boost the classification, to expand an audience, to mirror social mores, and to present a more definitive film. Chapter 3 also explores the idea of a queer remake. Queer-swaps are examined whereby a storyline that had previously been heterosexual is remade with queer characters, for example the made-for-television Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? (1996/2016). In the 1996 film, a teenage girl is unaware that her boyfriend is a vampire; in the 2016 remake, the central teen couple are lesbians. The notion of (re)inserted queer content, whereby queer material that had been sidelined from a previous version, is also examined—for example, the lesbian content that had been eliminated from the drama These Three (1936) but reinserted (in part) in the remake The Children’s Hour (1961)—alternatively, where entirely new queer material is added, such as the drag queens in A Star Is Born (2018), who had no presence in the 1937, 1954, or 1976 versions of the film. I discuss the queer gaze and inverted casting, and examine the range of explanations for queer spins on premade titles including to represent a changing society, to aid in marketing, and as queerbait. Also explored are remakes that lower the sexual quotient, be it by decreasing the sexiness or reducing the queer content. A brief discussion of pornographic remakes is also provided.
I begin my discussion of key concepts with a definition of remake and detail why I consider such films worthy of scholarly attention.
What Is a Remake?
The notion of what constitutes a remake is had in almost all academic work in this field. Questions like “how do we measure the amount of elements that have to be repeated for a film to count as a remake?”1 or “How far, and in what ways, can the boundaries of ‘remake’ be stretched, ‘made over’, before a new ‘original’ emerges?”2 are asked by scholars to establish parameters and assign criteria to determine which films warrant the “remake” label.
For general audiences, the term simply refers to material that has been made again; to use film theorist Thomas Leitch’s definition, remakes are just “new versions of older movies.”3 This broad and accessible definition is the one I employ in this book: my focus is on already-filmed stories that have been given a new life—or, even, new lives—by being filmed anew. Such a wide-ranging definition however, is not without contestation.
The adventure-drama King Kong (1933) for example, was remade with the same title and near-identical storylines in 1976 and 2005. The 1976 and 2005 versions exist as relatively clear-cut examples of remakes; in other instances, such classification is more complicated. Outside of refilmed screenplays, originary material might come from a different medium such as a play or a novel that gets adapted for the screen: think of the many screen incarnations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c.1597), or Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844). While I consider a first screen version to be an adaptation—and thus not of central inte...