Credit: Kevin Paul
Sun 17 May 2026 18:15, UK
Hollywood loves to remake movies. It’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to generate a profit without having to come up with an original idea, and if there’s one thing Hollywood doesn’t seem to have time for anymore, it’s funding a completely fresh concept. Existing IP is always the go-to, it seems.
Seriously, you only have to look at the highest-grossing movies of 2025 to see movies based on video games, pre-existing franchises, and remakes – Superman, A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, Jurassic World Rebirth, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Zootopia 2. There seems to be a drought of original ideas, but clearly, remakes and sequels are what sell, because people crave familiarity.
Remakes certainly do have their place though, especially when a bold new take is provided, perhaps bringing an old movie into a modern-day setting, or using another language, too. When Michael Haneke remade Funny Games word-for-word, frame-by-frame, with an English-speaking cast, 10 years on from his Austrian original, he actively tried to target the audience he believed needed to hear the movie’s message the most – Americans.
And what about David Cronenberg’s incredible body-horror take on The Fly or Brian De Palma’s bloodier, excess-laden version of Scarface? These remakes are proof that when a movie is brought into a different setting with an original angle at stake, it can work. But what did Demi Moore have in mind when she pitched a remake of a certain underrated ‘60s comedy?
For a long time, the star of The Substance has been interested in remaking What a Way to Go!, a star-studded black comedy that never received the flowers that Moore thinks it deserved, and if she could, she’d love to be in a remake of it, although she hasn’t ever been able to make this a reality.
Directed by J Lee Thompson, the movie is loaded with some of the era’s biggest names, from Shirley MacLaine and Dick Van Dyke to Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, Gene Kelly, and Dean Martin. It opens with a pink coffin being carried, only for the pallbearers to drop it down the stairs, which pretty much sets the tone for the movie.
MacLaine plays a woman who unexpectedly becomes rich when her husbands keep dying, but with each love interest, a different film genre is spoofed to highly stylised, campy effect. With outrageous outfits (MacLaine wears 72, to be precise) and set design, What a Way to Go! is a visual feast, but it never endured as well as it should – perhaps because it’s so over the top.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
But that’s why Moore loves it. “One of my favourites, all-time.What a Way to Go! I love that movie,” she said in conversation with Alec Baldwin for Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s like, I love that film. I tried to get them to remake it. It’s so funny.”
Perhaps a remake would be successful, but surely part of the charm of the 1964 film is its classic cast? Some of Hollywood’s greatest stars banded together for What a Way to Go!, and it seems pretty unimaginable to gather a group as impressive as that ever again.
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