Great, great non-music article, shock-full of insight. Example A:
The most obvious answer, though not the whole truth, says the screenwriter Wesley Strick (Cape Fear, The Saint and the forthcoming Nightmare on Elm Street remake), is that the average age of a Hollywood studio executive is 40. “The movies that rock your world generally come around when you are about 15,” he explains. At 56, Strick claims to be decidedly unmoved by the Eighties obsession. “That means the movies that rocked the average studio executive’s world were made in 1985. To him, Nightmare on Elm Street is a formative part of his youth and his identity and has seared itself on to his brain in a way that it absolutely didn’t affect me. So, for the executive it’s almost like a religious experience to have the opportunity to revive this movie.”
Example B:
And that , Strick says, is the real key to the Eighties boom. For a remake to work, the original has to be just bland enough, and just simplistic enough, to be reproduced without much damage to its central framework. In short, it has to be defiantly average. And, boy, did the Eighties produce a lot of defiantly average movies. “The Eighties were the beginning of a period in which movies became products,” Strick says. “The movies that Hollywood was making in the Seventies tended to be personal, idiosyncratic projects that don’t lend themselves to remakes. You’re not going to remake Five Easy Pieces or Rosemary’s Baby. The thing people always say in Hollywood is: ‘We’re making movies here, not widgets!’ But I think in the Eighties Hollywood actually started making widgets — these bright shiny products that they’re still making today. It’s the Bruckheimer-isation and the Spielberg-isation of Hollywood that became an epidemic that we’re still living through. And so the Eighties are the first period that can be easily updated to 2010 without any serious rethinking.”
Streaming Machinery 