It's bad enough when Hollywood is remaking the likes of Hitchcock, but now they've really gone too far. Disney is remaking the Elisabeth Shue movie Adventures in Babysitting.
I guess anything more than a decade old is fair game for remakes these days. Adventures in Babysitting was one of those campy, quaint, purely 80's movies that came, went, and then got rented by wide-eyed, unwary new VCR owners back in 1987. It was the first directing gig of one Christopher Columbus, who would later go on to fame as the helmer of such films as Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and oh yeah some of those Harry Potter movies.
The 1987 movie cast Shue as a high school senior stuck babysitting a bunch of kids. Her dull night at home with someone else's pint sized terrors is interrupted when she gets an urgent call for help from a friend downtown, and is forced to take her charges along with her on a rescue mission. Everything that can go wrong does, and soon they're lost amidst the terrors of the big city.
Now, The Hollywood Reporter says Disney is set to remake it with former Cosby kid turned kiddie-tainment star Raven Symone in Elisabeth Shue's babysitting role. She's signed an acting and producing deal with the mouse house, and even has a clause worked into her contract for a sequel should they somehow turn the remake into a whole franchise of babysitting mishaps.
Symone is one of the biggest stars on the Disney channel, and will almost certainly make the movie a massive hit with pre-teeners. It's unlikely that her presence will have the same effect on critics.
