Should Dirty Harry be remade today, but actually be a good remake?

I wonder if you seen E.T. today for the first time, would you still love it? I seen it at the theater when it first came out and liked it, but then didn't watch it again until just a couple of years ago. If you want to find out what I thought of it after all those years here's my review of E.T.

Some movies should stand as they are,too many reboots.

Because 20 years ago he hadn't directed Ready Player One.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

1941 might have been his first real stumbling block, and that was in 1979.

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Rules:

When women have a poet, they want a cowboy.
When they have a cowboy, they want a poet.
They'll say "I don't care if he's a poet or cowboy, so long as he's a nice guy. But oh, I'm so attracted to that bad guy over there."

Understand this last part, and you'll get them all.

Sure, but that was one misfire during the height of his career and he didn't really make another film on that level until Hook a full twelve years later. The rate at which he turns out bad movies (or lesser ones, anyway) has really picked up a lot over the past 20 years, though - Crystal Skull, The Terminal, The BFG, and so forth.

Probably, but I'm not sure it's that dire. See the chart below.

I'm going to start a thread analyzing what happened here as best I can, because I find Spielberg's progress/regress in the public's eye pretty interesting. I'm also doing most of this by hand, because I want to add my own annotations...everything else online is missing a lot of what I want to see in a chart.

It's not easy, but digging through the information online shows a lot of spurious results, mostly because they confuse his TV movies, shorts, and produced movies, and also enter in movies where he may have been partially directing.

Here's my initial stab. Very difficult to read, keep in mind, I'll re-do this later when I have time.

I'm settling on RT right now and showing the difference between their critic and audience scores. I'll include other sources later if I can properly normalize them 0-100.

Rough Draft:

Good idea.

Kudos for doing that! But as you said it was a rough draft could you please make your final draft with the movie titles on the left axis and using bar graphs. I have a hard time reading that style of chart.

Oh really, I thought The Terminal was one of Spielbergs best movies. I actually liked Crystal Skull. Not great of course, but a good solid popcorn movie I felt. It's the Moonraker of the series, but that doesn't mean terrible for me.

And in between all of those mentioned he has directed some fine films such as Lincoln, The Adventures of Tin Tin, The Post and Bridge of Spies. Sure, they’re not all on the same level as his earlier films, with the exception of Lincoln being great, but his quality hasn’t dropped off as much as claimed.

Spielberg's problem is that he's still making films for the 10 year old boy inside him...time for him to act his age!

The problem is that I want one axis to be the year. It'll better show when he takes time off. --->If a director decides to direct a bunch of movies all at once, he might be rushing through and doing a crappy job of it, etc.

I'll be glad to take a few stabs at it later. Time vs rating with movie name annotations within. Gonna be a lot of information to pack into an image....so I'm giving it a moment or two to think through.

Well on the topic of remakes, since most people do not like them do you ever think that producers and directors are sell outs for allowing their movies to be remade? Since John Carpenter allowed three of his movies to three of his movies to be remade now, with a possible fourth and fifth in the works, does that mean he's selling out?

First, I'd consider it heresy.

Second, it was a film that bucked the trend of the square jawed diligent hero cop - B/W Untouchables, Dragnet etc.

Dirty Harry was the first good cop that doesn't play by the rules to get the job done and justice dispensed.

It was the contrast to the normal depiction of cops that made it such a hit and a classic. Cop that doesn't play the rules is every cop on tv now, there wouldn't be the same sense of bucking the trend, giving us something new and unseen.

Technically, yes, though there's always the question of exactly which producers/directors retain the remake rights to their films or profit off said remakes in the first place. I can't exactly fault Carpenter for selling out - he wrote Halloween II to recoup money he didn't get for Halloween and most of his films have either been flops or low earners so it's not surprising to see him take a f*ck-you-pay-me attitude to other people remaking his films.

Oh okay I saw Carpenter in a interview saying that the good thing about people wanting to remake movies is he gets payed and doesn't have to do anything. Not sure if other producers and directors have their rights to their movies that have been remade, but wonder if it's the same attitude with them.