With all the crying about remakes of films that are ten or twenty years old, or even shorter than that in some cases, surely we can be happy about a remake of a movie from 1954, right? News has surfaced via Collider that the Weinsten Company’s remake of Seven Samurai has found itself a director in the form of Scott Mann, a British director who has worked mostly in short films while his first feature length picture was The Tournament back in 2009. The remake is being written by John Fusco, known for films such as Hidalgo, Young Guns and The Forbidden Kingdom. This new incarnation has a budget of $60 million and is intended to be set in the modern day Thailand by changing out the samurai for paramilitary contractors.
That’s right. Hold those Criterion Blu-ray editions a little closer to your heart, or go check out the anime series on Blu-ray, Samurai 7, which transposes it all into a far flung futuristic science fiction setting.
Original Plot Summary: One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope
there is only a couple of ways i could even see this film working well- the first way is getting a bunch of unkowns to play all the lead roles- the other is to get a lot of the american martial arts stars like jet li jackie chan donnie yen and the like to play the seven samurai. Excuse me in this version ii guess it is ex military ronin..
If they try to get top dollar hollywood actors like clooney- pitt- cruise and the like to play the samurai it will flop big time.