I’ve said before that if Hollywood is going to remake movies, they should consider remaking bad ones. Find a good idea that someone screwed up, take it, fix it, and shoot it. For once someone listened, because The Hollywood Reporter says Fox has hired Nicole Kidman to star in a remake of the 1953 movie How to Marry a Millionaire.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “You’re crazy Josh! How to Marry a Millionaire is a classic! It’s a Marilyn Monroe movie!” Monroe movie, yes, classic… maybe. But here’s the thing: Marilyn Monroe could not act. She was terrible. Oh I understand why people liked her at the time. She was a novelty, an aberration. Every time she shows up on screen she oozes sexuality. In the sexually repressed 50s, that was a pretty big deal. She couldn’t act, but she was hot and vaguely slutty and there wasn’t anyone else out there in the mainstream who the same could be said for. She was the first, and so people paid attention. Were she born today, where that sort of thing is more commonplace, she’d be kind of a national joke. She’d be Pamela Anderson.
What I’m saying here is that Marilyn Monroe movies just don’t age very well. She’s a terrible actress, so any film she’s been in can automatically be improved by remaking it with someone who actually knows how to act. Nicole Kidman, whatever you think of her, can indeed act. The question is, will Kidman be replacing Marilyn? Fox is keeping the plot of their remake under wraps, and the original had three female leads. How to Marry a Millionaire starred Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Lauren Bacall as three New York models tired of cheap men and poverty who decide to use their considerable feminine talents to land rich men.
Terminal scribe Sacha Gervasi has been hired to write the script, and will have the job of contemporizing the original movie to fit modern views on feminism. All he really has to do is watch a few episodes of ‘Sex in the City’ before writing.
