Often, in discussions about old movies, someone will say, “That movie couldn’t be made today.”, and inevitably someone else will disagree.
Some ones I’ve seen recently: Scary Movie. The Witches. Dressed to Kill. Cape Fear.
There is literally a new cape fear movie coming out, with Javier Bardem as Max.
Austin powers. It really didn’t age well, even though it was fairly progressive at the time.
My highschool physics teacher said the Nazis recorded X-ray video of Holocaust victims knees as they walked. Because MRI machines and other medical imagers aren’t large enough to walk around in, the films are still one of the best sources of how the bones actually move naturally under load in situ surrounded by the connective tissue.
The radiation dose required to expose regular film at 24 frames a second killed the subjects.
I really hope they don’t ever make movies like that again.
unfortunately China took up the mantle on medical torture with the Uyghurs.
Battle of Britain.
All the old warbirds are in museums now
In 2021 my friend’s roommate said you couldn’t make a movie like Borat these days. I immediately pointed out they made a Borat movie the year before.
I didn’t point this out, but he claimed to be 6’2" while being a few inches shorter than me, and I’m 5’11".
Cleopatra. There’s no way anyone would release a 4 hour historical drama as a movie. It would be a TV series these days.
Pootie Tang.
Sah dah tay, my damie!
Sah Dah Tay!
Say, Sine Yo pity on the Runny Kine
Famously, you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today because they already made that move in the 70s
Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. No way would a studio agree to do that much hand-crafted work. They’d just have the stars reacting to a bunch of tennis balls and “fix it in post.”
I think the biggest issue is David Bowe just hanging dong.
His leotard does not hide much in that movie.
No zoom-in necessary.
Down Periscope. It is the best and most accurate submarine movie in existence.
“Buckman! There was a fingernail in my food, ya fatass moron! Yesterday, it was a Band-Aid!”
Buckman: “Sorry, sir. The Band-Aid was holding the fingernail on.”
ITT
You couldn’t make the sixth sense either, because people would already know the ending.
But seriously, some racist stuff in there would never fly
No Way Out (1950). Depicts a race riot. At one point a character uses the N word dozens of times in a row uninterrupted. Much of Sidney Poitier’s career would be hard to remake these days. Pressure Point (1962) where he’s a therapist trying to deprogram a Nazi. Maybe that’s exactly what the world needs a remake of right now, but we’re not gonna get it.
Basic Instinct (1992), Body Heat (1981), that sort of thing. They might remake it into a TV show, but they’re not putting that much sex in theaters.
Charlie Chan. A series of detective films about a Chinese detective who was always played by a white guy. Though you could make this movie in 2026, you wouldn’t cast a white person.
Countless movies where the subject matter is painfully out of date. They used to make anti-alcohol pictures when prohibition was a thing. Couldn’t vs. wouldn’t, I guess.
Even if you cast an East Asian actor, i don’t think you could do Charlie Chan films, given how he’s a ” Yellow Peril “ stereotype. Even Marvel had to make their equivalent character a deliberately racist stereotype played by an actor
Look up all the stunts Buster Keaton did, and shiver. Or The Little Rascals or Hal Roach’s Rascals, whatever they were called.
Or the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet - while probably one of the best versions ever, nobody today would dare to think doing a movie like that today - it would be criminal.
That doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it today, it would just be a weurd cgi mess wuth marvel level cutaways
Well, the Rascals would be 100% cgi, not just because of the sometimes dangerous things the kids did, but also because they would not be allowed to be 12+ hours a day on set… at that age, they can only be on set for two hours a day IIRC, so filming this today with real actors would be horribly expensive.
And don’t even think about topless bedscenes with a 13 or 14 year old actress…
Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, TMNT ‘89, Lord of the Rings.
Whatever the JP franchise is now, it will never go back to full scale animatronics, and without Stan Winston’s magic, it’ll never be quite what the first (and a bit of the second) were.
Cameron himself can’t recreate the magic of T2 even if his films make billions. He never risks having to “nail this in one shot” stunts.
As for TMNT. Nobody gives a shit they’re suits, we could suspend our disbelief and watched mindblowing performances by great stuntmen in some of the most advanced animatronics ever. Michael Bay can’t even fathom how much better that is.
The Hobbit was plagued by a lot of problems, but I don’t know if even Jackson could pull off the practical effects with digital overlay magic that was the first trilogy if he tried.
That era of Hollywood, practical first, digital to enhance (sparingly) is gone it seems. It’s sad Hollywood has forgotten that that boundary pushing era was what made those films iconic. Rexy had weight, she literally tore a car apart. You can see the chaos of the semi landing in the canal. The turtles hit. The Riders of Théoden truly rode for ruin. Tell me you don’t get giddy when you know that scene is about to hit.
Project Hail Mary was practical first. Real sets, real puppet, with digital enhancements. There is a scene that was filmed with loads of LEDs on wires to cover the shot in blinking red lights. I think it pays off hugely and the film is better for it all.
At the moment I think it’s an outlier and most films will continue to just film green screens and tennis balls but it might herald the return of practical, maybe even full-scale animatronics! I can only hope.
I hope that film wins awards, genuinly good sci-fi made by people who understand movies and dont just fix it in post. It fealt real, the sinple trick of not having sound if the camera is not in a place with atmosphere is one of the most important little details. 2001 gets it right, Firefly gets it right, but if you can hear lazers in space, your just bring a wizard in 0g.
You know I was just thinking about this the other day. Netflix will put out their standard 10 hour “epic” and the world still manages to feel a tenth the size, and there will be a tenth of the action as any one of the three hour LOTR movies. It really makes me appreciate just how masterful those movies were, and how every artistic license they took with the original material feels more than justified.
In the sequel of The Thing they first used animatronics and later replaced them with CG. I’m still angry about what could have been an awesome movie. With CG it looks just bad.
Jurassic Park used CGI for many of its dinosaur scenes, they weren’t all animatronic.
What animatronics were used in LOTR? Gollum was CGI.
I’m not saying you’re wrong but some of your examples don’t seem right.
As I said, practical first, digital secondary or to enhance seems to be the secret sauce of creating something stunning. Most of the intimate shots with Rexy and the kids are practical. When she busts through the sunroof and tries to eat them… terrifyingly real because there’s a “real” thing attacking them. LOTR is real for a different reason- physical armor, cast of thousands. Compare the Rohirrim and armies of Mordor in that movie to the unified CGI mess that is the Battle of Five Armies in the Hobbit. Even using physical miniature sets for the big locations like Minas Tirith gives them weight.
Who is JP? Why is everyone throwing letters around assuming everyone else will understand.
The first two words of his comment were “Jurassic Park”…
EVERYthing made by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Keaton
We’ve got laws, now, against the insane shit they did on-set, back then…
Lives were too-cheap, back then…
_ /\ _
One of his stunts literally broke his neck.
He was told by his doctor about it 9 years later.Agree, but the problem with doing it today would be they couldn’t get insurance to cover it.
