Ben-Hurting: A Fail of the Christ

Why, oh why, is a remake for Ben-Hur in talks?

MGM must be barren wasteland of no ideas.  I see this going one of two ways: this could have been pitched as Oscar bait, an expensive winter release with an all-star director and cast, or a summer blockbuster that uses modern technology to, erm, update all the effects of the 1959 original. 

The all-practical effects in an 18-acre set piece with 15,000 extras and live chariot racing, as seen in 1959.  BUT IMAGINE IF IT WAS ALL CGI.

 Given that MGM is currently in talks with Timur Bekmambetov, the guy who directed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’m guessing the latter choice.  Ben-Hur will be an unnecessary, uncalled for summer action blockbuster with a B-grade cast so they can spend more money on all the fight scenes and action sequences.

I’d like to float Liam Hemsworth for the lead.  He seems like a pretty major cinema draw.

Here’s the problem: summer blockbusters are not the cash cows they used to be.  Quite the opposite, and we’re hardly the first to notice this.  This summer, a string of over-long, 200-million-dollar-plus budget films, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, White House Down, After Earth, and Elysium have all lost money.  Lone Ranger alone may lose 190 million dollars for Disney, after an insane 215 million dollar budget, and that’s the low estimate, by the way.  This bad boy clocks in at 149 minutes, a budding hallmark of the drawn-out, big-budget summer action movie.

The 1959 Ben-Hur fits the portrait of the expensive, over-long summer blockbusters of today.  At the time, it was the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of  $118 million, adjusting for inflation, and this sucker has a run time of 224 minutes. The updated Bekmambetov version will have to be long and expensive to do any justice to the original story.  But here’s the problem: A Ben-Hur update has no clear audience.  I don’t know who MGM thinks will go see this movie.  On one hand, Bekmambetov could up the violence of the action sequences and go for a PG-13 rating, drawing action-oriented audiences.  But the subtitle of this movie’s source material, the Lew Wallace novel, is, “A Tale of the Christ,” and somehow that doesn’t sound like a tagline that will bring the fan boys running.  Alternatively, Bekmambetov could keep this a family film, shoot for the PG rating, and try to attract the Evangelical dollars.  This brings to mind films like Evan Almighty, at date the most expensive comedy ever filmed and which had banked on bringing Christians to the box office, and John Carter, which didn’t specifically aim for Christian audiences but did try to pitch itself as a family action film.  Both of these films were studio disasters, losing $88 million and $200 million dollars for their respective studios.

Can you believe we’re talking in dollar amounts this insane?

I’m calling it right now: The new Ben-Hur will lose $150 million dollars.  You heard it here first. The only upshot is that if this movie fails spectacularly-- and oh, it will-- we'll never have to sit through a remake of Casablanca or Gone with the Wind.

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