It’s easy to rail against remakes, but every now and then Hollywood actually remakes something that needs to be remade. In this instance, they’re considering a remake of Flash Gordon.
If you haven’t seen the original Flash Gordon movie, it’s a brightly colored, crazy, mess. It’s the story of an athlete whisked off to an alien planet named Mongo with his friends. There, they fight a dictator named Ming the Merciless and meet weird aliens. The movie version is something of a camp classic, the kind of movie you pop in late at night and laugh at. It did have a kind of cool Queen soundtrack (oddly enough this is one of two movies with a cool Queen soundtrack announced to be remade today... see our story on the Highlander remake), but otherwise, it’s pretty obviously bad. Even worse was the property’s most recent redo, a short-lived series on the Sci-Fi channel last year.
What I’m getting at here is that in every on screen incarnation, Flash Gordon has basically sucked. That’s kind of a shame, because the 30s comic strip it was based on is sort of good. There’s potential in there somewhere for something cool, it just hasn’t happened yet. So if there was ever a franchise in need of a do-over, it’s this one. Bring on the remake!
According to HR the redo may happen courtesy of Columbia Pictures. They’re in talks to acquire an adaptation with Breck Eisner attached to direct. Eisner is probably best known as the director of Sahara, a mediocre adventure movie starring a half-stoned Matthew McConaughey. Yeah he’s probably not the first choice of fans, but there’s really no way his adaptation won’t be better than the other ruinous wrecks Flash Gordon has been turned into. The bar is pretty low here and there’s nowhere to go but up for Flash Gordon.
