Between the female-led Ghostbusters and the gender-swapped Splash, the eighties seem to be enjoying a reimagined remake boom. Here’s five reboots we wouldn’t mind watching.
‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
Rowan Blanchard stars as Ferris Bueller, a teen who just wants one day off from school to drive fast cars or discuss intersectional feminism or whatever. She spends the day hanging out with Amandla Stenberg and crashing Beyonce concerts. Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig also co-star as her oblivious moms, with Sandra Oh as the very angry Dean of Discipline.
‘Back to the Future’
With 2015 come and gone, why not gear up for a Back to the Future reboot? Zendaya stars as a teen whiz kid inventor who’s convinced that she can build a time machine. After researching Doc Brown, she fixes up her own version of the DeLorean, takes it out for a test drive, and to her surprise and initial delight ends up in 1997.
The world of boy bands and choker necklaces is all at once eerily similar and unsettling for Zendaya, but things take a turn from bad to worse when she finds and returns a stranger’s lost purse… only to realize it belongs to her now seventeen-year-old mother, Angela. Panic dawns as Zendaya remembers that her father Shawn was meant to find Angela’s purse — her parents’ entire relationship originally began with his epic quest to return it to her!
With her parents running in separate cliques at school, has Zendaya ruined their chances of ever getting to know each other before graduation rolls around? Did her good samaritan gesture singlehandedly erase her own future from existence? With nowhere else to turn, Zendaya hunts down the 1997 versions of Doc Brown and Marty McFly and enlists them in helping her to both put together her parents, as well as the parts for her DeLorean so she can get back to the future.
‘The Goonies’
A Goonies remake has been in the works for years, but the rumor is that studios haven’t found a way to make a sequel that lives up to the beloved original. But what if the gang of Goonies was a group of raucous girls? Led by the newly-animated princess sisters Jenna Ortega and Aimee Carrero, this would be one treasure hunt worth experiencing.
‘Overboard’
The 1987 film starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell (and directed by the late, great Garry Marshall) is definitely problematic by 21st century standards, but if you put your morality aside, it truly is a delightful little rom-com.
Our updated, gender-swapped reboot would star a scrappy carpenter named Deanna Proffitt and her four equally badass but mischievous daughters. When Deanna gets cheated out of her salary by a spoiled, selfish, trust-fund kid named John Stayton, she “rescues” him from his amnesia by bringing him home to work off his unpaid carpentry bill.
Antics ensue as “Johnny” begins to fall in love with his new family, learning to become a stellar stay-at-home dad — and maybe helping build a few doll houses along the way…
‘The Breakfast Club’
The original Breakfast Club took place in prototypical middle America, but what if the same five high school stereotypes were locked up in a library together in… Compton?
In a world of gang rivalries and chola eyebrows, what kind of power dynamics would happen between a brainy brown girl and a drug lord prince? A basketcase boy and a soccer superstar?