Hollywood has always been addicted to remakes, re-imaginings and straightforward rip-offs of existing films. Sometimes, this can be hugely successful, as the lucrative release of Wicked has proved. At other times, however, it seems nothing more than a bewildering lack of imagination.
This may have reached its nadir in 2002 with John McTiernan’s remake of the minor Seventies cult classic Rollerball – as my colleague Tim Robey has noted so brilliantly in his recent book Box Office Poison, it is one of the rare films that flopped so spectacularly that its director ended up going to prison. Such a fate may befall the mooted remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the 1968 family musical that may, on paper, be a piece of harmless fun, but was riddled with inexplicable darkness and chaos.
