Posted on 01/24/2024 9:39:28 AM PST by Red Badger
Legendary Hollywood gems like the “Wizard Of Oz” and the Christmas classic “It’s A Wonderful Life” are both getting what director and writer Kenya Barris is calling a “diverse” reboot.
Speaking to Variety at the Sundance Film Festival, Barris confirmed he’s working on scripts for both films and giving the Judy Garland 1939 movie a new look with a story told from a “different point of a view.”
“The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ took place during the Great Depression and it was about self-reliance and what people were going through,” Barris told the outlet.
“I think this is the perfect time to switch the characters and talk about what someone imagines their life could be,” he added. “It’s ultimately a hero’s journey, someone thinks something’s better than where they’re at, and they go and realize that where they’re at is where they should be.”
“I want people to be proud and happy about where they’re from,” Barris continued. “But I want the world to take a look at it and I hope that will come through.”
The “Black-ish” creator also talked about his remake of the 1946 Frank Capra classic starring Jimmy Stewart and said he plans to tell the story but with a “person of color” instead.
“I feel like Christmas movies are amazing and I think the idea of taking something that has that long of a history and a tale behind it and putting an amazing piece of talent to tell that story,” Barris said.
“It’s a guy who’s trying to help out his community and things are going to turn around on him,” he added. “I think that’s the perfect story to tell for a person of color — Black or brown — to get into that because our communities have some issues and someone trying to help that community out. I think that’s the perfect vehicle to tell that story from.”
During his appearance last year on “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon,” Barris spoke a bit about one of the upcoming projects he was working on with “diverse” characters that was a twist on the “Wizard of Oz” story.
“I think that this is the best time to turn a mirror on society because we need to see ourselves, and I want to do it with diverse characters,” Barris said.
Barris told Fallon his version of Dorothy is a girl who “lives in Inglewood, and someone comes up and she ends up in Underhood, which is right outside of Oz, and it takes place from there.”
“I wanted to make people think, but also make them feel good, and also make people feel seen who hadn’t felt seen,” he added.
The reboots will be It’s a fo shizzle life yo, and The Wiz is a bad mofo.
They'll make him look remarkably like Donald Trump, I'm sure...
From now on all movies need to be made in Nigeria or Niger.
Lol.
To be gentle:
These are unnecessary, and unwanted remakes.
We (many of us anyway) like our old-fashioned illusions. Movies are often pleasent escape media entertainmet. Forcing movies to carry heavy propaganda messages makes them unpalatable. That’s why remakes so often miserably fail.
It ain’t hard to grok...
The message I’m getting from this is that black people are not creative enough to come up with their own stories and so they have to appropriate the culture from other, better people. Is that the message they want to send?
Black folks keep doing cultural appropriation by using the white man’s electricity.
;-)
Remaking movies that are not screaming for a remake is usually a bad idea. Making them racial, makes the decision even worse. Because when they fail at the box office, the racial aspect is blamed. In reality, who hasn’t seen “It’s a wonderful life” 100 times? Who is going to drop $20 to go see it again?
“The Wicked Witch will still be white.”
She was green.
I’ve often said black midgets are seriously under represented in Hollywood. //s
They’ll probably make her white. 🙃
A remake of Dr. Strangelove would be hilarious—it would be banned everywhere.
But only after the film switched to color in the land of Oz.
A woke remake of Its A Wonderful Life.
Figures ,
Libs want to tear down and pervert anything decent
Sometimes I think the only reason they make these movies is to have excuse to cry “racism” when the movie flops at the box office.
“The Wiz was a FLOP.”
And that was when Good Times and Sanford and Son were on the air.
“The Wizard of Oz” movie was based on a novel by L. Frank Baum, published in 1900, so it had nothing to do with the Great Depression. Baum died 10 years before the stock market crash of 1929.
She will be white and a capitalist.
Making is less white will mean making less money. Simple equation.
Hollywood doesn’t actually make movies anymore. They just announce them.
These movies will never be made.
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