GITS reader Matt Allen got to Patrick Goldstein’s “The Big Picture” blog before I could today. The always insightful Goldstein weighs in with a very familiar topic in these parts — Remakes:

Hollywood, as everyone knows, is teeming with liberals of every shape, size, creed and color. Away from work, the legions of Prius-driving actors, filmmakers and studio executives are always busy ardently promoting some desperately important progressive cause, whether it’s spreading the word about jailed journalists in Egypt, saving an endangered species in Africa or helping lead a sponsor boycott against Fox News’ resident bomb-thrower Glenn Beck for labeling Barack Obama a racist.

But when it comes to making new product these days, Hollywood is perhaps the most enthusiastic outpost anywhere of cultural conservatism. Judging from the announcement stories that pop up in Variety every week, the movie and TV businesses are obsessed with reliving the past, giving the green light to a deluge of projects adapted from old (and, ahem, not-so-very old) movies and TV shows.

I posted about the “similar but different” mentality in Hwood here and here. And about remakes specifically here, here, and here among many, many posts on the subject. But reading Goldstein’s overview of remakes in development, especially with so many of them being directed and/or produced by top talent, it is still rather shocking:

Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful living filmmaker, recently announced that he’s doing a remake of “Harvey,” the 1950 Jimmy Stewart comedy, with that project bumping aside, for the time being, Spielberg’s involvement as a director in a remake of “Matt Helm,” the 1970s TV series that is being developed as a feature at Paramount.

Robert Zemeckis, another major league filmmaker, is at Disney, doing a remake of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”; Bryan Singer is now at work on a remake of 1981′s “Excalibur”; while horror-meister Rob Zombie, fresh off his second “Halloween” movie, is redoing the sci-fi camp classic “The Blob.” (which had already been remade once before). “Shoot ‘Em Up” director Michael Davis is doing a remake of “Outland,” the 1981 Sean Connery-starring sci-fi thriller, while Screen Gems is moving ahead with a reboot of Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs.”

There are dozens upon dozens of remakes already on the studio release slates. MGM has a new version of “Fame” due out later this month, with a remake of “Red Dawn” in the works. Sony, which just did a remake of “The Taking of Pelham 123″ this summer, has remakes of “Karate Kid” and “The Green Hornet” coming next summer. 20th Century Fox has a new version of “Gulliver’s Travels” coming next summer, with a remake of “The A-Team” to follow, along with yet another installment in its “Predator” series, this one from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. Universal has updates of both “The Wolfman” and “Robin Hood,” the latter with Russell Crowe in the lead role and Ridley Scott behind the camera.

But wait … there’s more. Paramount already has a remake of “Footloose” on its schedule for next year, with a revamped “Beverly Hills Cop” in active development. Warners has an updated “Sherlock Holmes,” with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, coming this Christmas, with remakes of “Clash of the Titans” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” due in 2010.

And on and on and on the list goes. But really, you can just stop with the words “Steven Spielberg” and the points is made. He’s done remakes in the past including Always (1989) and Hook (1991), but at least the latter had an interesting, fresh twist: What if Peter Pan grew up? But then there’s War of the Worlds (2005) — was there any good reason to remake that movie? Same with Harvey. And Matt Helm? Yikes!

Goldstein provides three reasons for Hwood’s current obsession with remakes:

1) They work.

As a way of explaining the appeal of the remake formula, a top studio executive walked me through the history of Warners’ “Batman” franchise. It began as a TV series, then morphed into a series of big-screen features, which were huge moneymakers — when Tim Burton was at the helm — until the studio pretty much buried the franchise as the films turned into ghastly camp exercises. The studio then relaunched the series with Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” which spawned “The Dark Knight,” which ended up becoming the second-highest-grossing film of all time.

“If you look at that progression, you would have to say that audiences didn’t reward anyone for creating anything new,” the studio exec explained. “In fact, if you can make even more money than you could possibly imagine by doing a sequel to a film that was in itself a reboot of an old film series after it was a TV show, how would that experience possibly persuade any studio chief that people want something new and different?”

2) Moviegoers crave familiarity.

Familiarity is hard to beat. Since January 2007, the top 10 grossing films at the box office have all been sequels, reboots of franchises or action movies based on pre-existing comic book characters. Studio marketers say that we live in a media environment so full of noise and clutter that having a movie title with a little built-in resonance is a crucial selling point. If you can build your campaign around a familiar hook, whether it’s “Star Trek” or “Halloween” or “Get Smart,” people can identify the genre of the film and have some basic understanding of what the movie is about.

3) Filmmakers have given the thumbs-up to remakes.

A decade ago, it wasn’t easy to seduce a top filmmaker into jumping onto the remake bandwagon. It was almost a point of pride for filmmakers to apply their artistry to original material. But with careers more difficult to sustain than ever, a host of top filmmakers have abandoned their resistance to franchise-able projects. After all, it was Michael Mann who remade “Miami Vice,” just as it was Spielberg who went back to the well to do another “Indiana Jones” movie while Chris Nolan has stuck with the “Batman” franchise and Sam Raimi has hung in with the “Spider-Man” series.

So if we conclude that reason #3 is simply following a trend established by reasons #1 and #2, then the real reason for all the remakes is us.

I’d like to propose a 4th reason: Old farts may experience War of the Worlds and Harvey as remakes, but the key movie demographic — males, 18-30 — they weren’t born when a lot of these movies were made, so they don’t think of them as remakes.

Where does that leave things for people who care about seeing good movies: Boycott all remakes? Buy tickets only to new original movies?

Personally I wouldn’t have anything against remakes if Hwood would do like The Wrap columnist Michael Adams suggested in this post:

Anyway, as I’ve said before, why not focus more on flicks with good ideas that weren’t done right the first time around, rather than simply retelling already brilliantly told stories simply to make a buck?

To that end, a modest proposal.

Before plundering the likes of “The Silence of the Lambs.” “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Piano,” “Groundhog Day” or “GoodFellas,” how about retooling these 13 movie misses from the 1990s into something audiences might see and enjoy in the 20-tweens?

His list?

“Memoirs of an Invisible Man”

“Quick Change”

“Joe Versus The Volcano”

“Darkman”

“Arachnophobia”

“King Ralph”

“Clean Slate”

“Drop Dead Fred”

“Airheads”

“Candyman”

“Innocent Blood”

“Jetsons: The Movie”

“Life Stinks!”

Can you think of other ‘bad’ movies with ‘good’ concepts that deserve to be remade?

H/T to Matt Allen for the link.