Recently, deep into a mindless scroll of X, a supposed entertainment news post caught my eye. It claimed that Disney is remastering Orson Welles’s seminal 1941 film “Citizen Kane” in 4K, “updating it for modern audiences with meaningful additions such as credit scores and transition lenses.”
This in itself wasn’t particularly earth-shattering news — Hollywood is notoriously addicted to churning out director’s cuts and unnecessary remasters. However, the intrigue came with a quote in the following sentence: Disney CEO Bob Iger had declared that this remaster “is exactly what we think Orson Welles would have wanted.” How the folks at Disney determined the desires of a filmmaker deceased for 40 years, particularly regarding digital technology that didn’t exist in his lifetime, is beyond me. Accompanying the announcement was a side-by-side intended to showcase these “meaningful additions.” It only managed to display slightly altered shading on a minor character’s reading glasses. It was patently unimpressive.
At first, this “Citizen Kane” remaster seemed outrageous yet plausible. Disney, like all other Hollywood studios, is determined to squeeze as much money as possible out of their legacy properties. A “Citizen Kane” remaster with the ostensible purpose of realizing Welles’s wishes for his film didn’t seem out of the question. Unsure of what to believe, a quick search revealed the post to be satire. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s alarming trend of “updating” classic films has made it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction, and it begs an important question: Why can’t we have nice things? A healthy streaming service requires a balance of classic movies and great new works. By bloating their homepages with sanitized, “modernized” versions of classics, studios may chase a short-term fiscal payoff, but they fail to preserve the legacy of the films they claim to protect.
There are many real examples of this alarming trend. The worst abomination of them all is arguably the “abridged edition” of “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Amazon Prime. The original classic follows George Bailey as he contemplates suicide following the disappearance of $8,000 of company funds. While standing on the edge of a bridge, George’s guardian angel Clarence appears and shows him an alternate reality where he had never been born. It is this pivotal sequence — seeing his hometown, Bedford Falls, descend into hedonism and despair without his generosity — that allows George to realize the profound impact of his life.
Amazon Prime pared the 130-minute runtime down by 22 minutes, cutting the entire alternate reality sequence. In this version, George goes from standing on the bridge begging for the missing money to running joyfully through the streets of Bedford Falls with no explanation. For a viewer unfamiliar with the original, the only logical conclusion is that George’s guardian angel simply handed him the money. For the sake of slight brevity, Amazon carved the soul out of this extraordinary film.
As studios allocate resources towards these misguided re-releases, less attention is paid to the labor that built them in the first place — the making of original films. The streaming revolution has made the entertainment industry ultra-competitive, with the singular goal of keeping viewers subscribed. This means a consistent stream of new content must be showcased on the platform homepage at all times, making customers intent on cancelling their subscriptions reconsider at the very last second. In this high stakes dynamic, it is perfectly understandable why studios favor producing re-releases over original films — they are a safe bet. Sometimes it feels like the companies even forgo cranking out a subpar rerelease and just redesign the film poster, seemingly to trick viewers into thinking it is a movie they have never seen before.
The future of legacy studios remains unclear if they continue along the path of least resistance: meddling with films that cannot possibly be made better today than they were in the past. It may be a boundlessly appealing prospect, but this practice only prolongs the creative drought that much of Hollywood is entrenched in. Not every new film is destined to be a stroke of genius, but the only way to ensure that great films continue to be made is for studios to stop “updating” the past and start trying something new. Great works come to be appreciated — eventually — and critical and commercial acclaim awaits those who alter course.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
