A-List: Movies We'd Like to See Remade with Female Casts
By J. Don Birnam
July 21, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com

She's a killer...queen.
Unless you’ve lived under a rock the last few months, you know that all-female cast remakes of insanely popular movies from Ghostbusters to Ocean’s Eleven have angered many a fanboy on the web. I must admit, I’m not one to advocate remakes - of any kind - though I’m not sure why remakes motivated by the “all female cast” trope have to be hated on any more than, say, remakes motivated by desires to do “with zombies” adaptation, or simply with a new actor. And, as the Ghostbusters movie showed, at least to me, there can be value to extract from a different perspective. And, in any case, this is just hypothetical fun and games so keep your pitchforks and torches to yourself.

That said, the possibilities are endless. My only rule here is that the movie has to have originally focused on male character or characters. If there is a female lead, such as in a romantic comedy, then let’s leave those to the side. And of course if you’ve been reading you know there is no dearth of these films. Movies about cops and robbers, for example, are mostly male dominated. The other point of today’s column is to try to think of some of the potential plot lines and casting for these reboots.

Given that there are so many options, I’d love to hear your thoughts on
twitter.

5. Any James Bond Film

The rumors of Idris Elba as potentially the first black James Bond have not generated as much hate as the Ghostbusters or Ocean Eleven’s remakes have, but I bet that would change quickly of Hollywood announced the arrival of Jasmine Bond.

I’m going to resist the urge to name Angelina Jolie as the obvious casting choice for all action movies that I may discuss today, but lord help me, I can’t resist it for this one. Is there a badder ass actress prepared for this role? She’s already carried many action movies on her own (Salt, Lara Croft, Wanted, to name just a handful). She definitely has the sexy looks. I’m sure she can pull of a British accent, right?

In the first movie, The Woman With the Golden Gun, Jasmine faces off with an evil and vengeful maniac who wants to rid the world of both Bond as well as civility, by bombing its male inhabitants out of existence. The rest I’ll leave to your imagination, but let’s just say that at the very least we want Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans to moonlight as Bond’s lovers, some of whom die untimely deaths and some of whom are treacherous and vile.

4. American Psycho (2001)

You thought Patrick Bateman was sick? Wait until you see what Patricia Bateman, his long lost evil sister, played by Charlize Theron, does to men’s nether regions.

Patricia is a sick mix between the character from the original film and the sleazy Katherine Merteuil of Cruel Intentions origin. She’s sick of being treated like a schoolgirl by the preppy society of New York’s Upper West Side. She’s a partner at a litigation law firm, and she’s sick of having to act nice while being a big b!tch to get ahead.

In revenge, she goes on a killing spree that includes some of her friends and their lovers’, and that covers all sorts of gruesome killing methods from being pick-axed, to poisonous apples (a Charlize specialty in other films).

Patricia doesn’t keep her victims’ heads in a freezer like Bale’s character did, but she does keep…ahem…other parts. And while she does occasionally sink down to calling on gigolos to find new victims, being a modern woman in Manhattan, there is nothing a Chinese food delivery boy can’t moonlight as…

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.