A-List: Movies We'd Like to See Remade with Female Casts
By J. Don Birnam
July 21, 2016
3. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Is it cheating to pick a gay film? Perhaps. But don’t you want to see Julianne Moore and Annette Bening reprise their role as lovers in the story of ill-fated paramours in the mountains of Wyoming? Okay, no offense but perhaps those two have outgrown the roles, but nothing that a little dose of Scarlett Johansson and Vivica Fox can’t cure.
You can have the movie even be set in World War II Germany - oh, wait, that’s been done. Or as two secret lovers one of whom is married to a mobster - oh, wait, that’s been done too.
Fine, so Hollywood has given us a lot of lesbian romance to play with. Still, I think the now classic gay love story could use that perspective an upgrade. And the setting could be almost identical - they wouldn’t be cowgirls necessarily, but farmhands works, or some other type of domestic repressed housewives. Oh, wait, that’s been done too.
2. Patriot Games (1993)
Although nominally similar to the James Bond movies, the Jack Ryan character is much more serious and less over the top at least in theory. He’s also a goody-two-shoes American hero.
Honestly, when it comes to action movies by Harrison Ford, it was between this and Air Force One, which would have been an easy target simply because you could switch Ford with Glenn Close and voila. But as the latest Independence Day film suggests, female presidents are around the corner, so I’m going to assume that Hollywood will take care of those.
International spy masters like Jack Ryan…on the other hand. You can either have Jacqueline Ryan or Jesse Bourne, take your pick. I went with Ryan simply because you want the ambassador to France to save a train from terrorists while vacationing with her loving family, only to find herself in the middle of a dangerous game of revenge.
Jacqueline would be played by Uma Thurman, and her doting husband would be Tom Cruise, who will have to learn to be a B-star from now on. Uma’s main antagonist is an evil Meryl Streep, whom for unknown reasons is backing extreme radicals from a certain hot button region.
Okay, so the plot line needs a little work, but you know that you want The Bride to kick some terrorist @ss in Europe only to be chased all the way back home to Bethesda, where she will kick some more.
1. Fight Club (1997)
Though I did not include them last time when I looked at buddy robber movies (were these guys really robbers?), the classic David Fincher film about two somewhat deranged pals that become bro-buddies and the leaders of a cultish underground secret society is just screaming for an all-female cast remake.
The casting would be key here, but I’m thinking Jennifer Lawrence and Shailene Woodley are two credible action heroines working today. You could also go a little bit older with Hilary Swank and Penelope Cruz, I suppose, but the two younger have more recent experiences.
Here, again, the idea would be to exploit the female angle of the film without sinking into comedy - the movie is after all a deeply dark and anxious piece. But it is hard to imagine a movie about female anger without a target, and women do not seem as angry against society as men do. But hey, maybe they are. The angry vixens in The Purge: Election year sure were mad as well.
So they form an underground society of pain and mayhem, and lead each other into doom. The question is: who is the figment of whose imagination? I think we all know of those two, who kicks the most butt.
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