I’ve never really understood the wailing and gnashing of teeth that some fans have when filmmakers make a new attempt at bringing a story to the big screen. Reamkes are a trigger for some fans to just freak out. And while there is a definite argument to make that the flood of remakes does hinder the amount of films based on new, original ideas that can be made, I don’t necessarily view a remake in and of itself a bad thing. Even the news of a property returning to the big screen can have fans reacting negatively, even before details of the new project are fully out there.
Case in point – the recently announced Mary Poppins movie that director Rob Marshall will be heading up. Many folks howled that it would be treading on the sacred ground of Disney’s classic 1964 version. Well, in an interview with Vulture, Marshall has confirmed that his new film will not be a remake of that movie but instead will draw from some of the other books in the series written by P L Travers.
P.L. Travers wrote eight books all together. [Disney] worked from the first book, and we are working from the other books, not touching the iconic brilliance of [the 1964] Mary Poppins. This is an extension. I’m a huge fan of the original, and I’m a very good friend of Julie Andrews, and I hold it in such awe. There is all this new material — it was the Harry Potter of its time — and they were never turned into anything further than that adventure.
Marshall’s clarification about the film does support the original reporting on the project which positioned the new film more as a sequel set twenty years after the original film.
There’s still no word on any additional creatives attached to the project and no release date set.
