Scarface Remake To Be Penned By Paul Attanasio
That’s right, folks, Hollywood’s back at it again. The past few years have been filled with remakes upon remakes upon “reimaginings”, and the people have voiced their (mostly negative) opinions about the trend. But now they have decided to remake a remake of a classic…’Scarface’.
Announced last year, Universal has officially ordered a contemporary take on the classic. One would imagine that the 2011 film ‘The Devil’s Double’ would have been a great contemporary imagining of Scarface, as the premises were basically the same save for locations.
David Ayer, who wrote ‘Training Day’, was signed on to pen the remake – but Deadline is now reporting that Paul Attanasio has been hired to rewrite the Scarface update. Attanasio’s writing credits include ‘Sphere’ and ‘The Sum of All Fears’, with only the latter of the two receiving somewhat decent review scores (The Sum of All Fears currently holds a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
What the people have found odd is that the popular Al Pacino version of Scarface was, at its time of release, a contemporary update of the first version. What stands to be made now is akin to its 1983 predecessor. We have now reached a point where, thirty some-odd years after release, films now require “contemporary updates” for modern audiences. This roughly equates to hashing out the same storylines with different costumes, and eventually cycles out any creativity – and dignity – Hollywood may in fact have left.
Remakes of remakes, reimaginings of remakes, and remakes of those very reimaginings; moviegoers frequently air their disgust with this cycle on various comment hosting movie sites – perhaps most notably the sections of Comingsoon.net being the most vocal.
One comment posted under the article asked, “Godfather next?” – and one trembles to think what those comments might yield, as ‘The Godfather’ is seen as one of the truly great films Hollywood has put out.
So what can the audience expect out of the new Scarface? Well, the producers – Martin Bregma and Marc Shmuger — have stated that they intend to take elements of both versions and incorporate them into the remake, so we can presumably expect the same thing we got out of the 1983 version sans Al Pacino.
