More Remakes?

Thanks to the success of last year’s 3:10 to Yuma (based on a 1957 movie with the same title), Hollywood studios can’t wait to update additional oldies, hoping to earn even more big bucks from eager fans. Rumor has it that movie moguls have given the go-ahead to the following projects:

1. CITIZEN KANE. Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese promises that Orson Welles’ first movie will be made right this time. He plans on recruiting versatile Jim Carrey for the role of the power hungry newspaper owner patterned after real-life William Randolph Hearst.

2. CASABLANCA. With stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld in the Humphrey Bogart role (they do look alike) and Sharon Stone replacing Ingrid Bergman, this new version should go over like gangbusters. Because filmmakers have a basic instinct about these things, they’ve added an interrogation scene for Stone that will give new meaning to the film’s most memorable line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

3. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres will pair up (in the former Paul Newman and Robert Redford roles) for this feminist treatment of one of my favorite flicks. I understand even all the horses will be mares and fillies.

4. MRS. MINIVER: THE MUSICAL. Madonna gets another shot at an Academy Award nomination with her unique interpretation of a valiant British housewife during World War II. Keeping a stiff upper lip, she will lead sing-a-longs in air raid shelters and dance up a storm at the end of the war, just like Greer Garson did in the original movie (or was that Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music?)

5. TOOTSIE. Dustin Hoffman earned a well-deserved Oscar for dressing up like a woman in this classic 1980 comedy. I smell another Oscar here, this time for wrestler-turned-actor The Rock.

APRIL FOOL!