Less Shaft, more House Party: Hollywood revisits 90s black film boom
Hollywood’s remake trend knows no limits. After delivering a steady stream of profitable, white-centric remakes, studios are turning their attention to popular black-centric films from the past.
Film studios are remaking a slew of small-budget 90s movies including Set It Off, New Jack City and House Party that delivered respectable box office returns and became black pop culture mainstays. The remakes come after campaigns for increased diversity in Hollywood, including #OscarsSoWhite and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at University of Southern California.
The gritty female heist movie Set It Off and the Harlem-set neo-noir New Jack City helped propel the acting careers of black stars including Wesley Snipes, Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah. House Party, meanwhile, featured a young, still relatively unknown Martin Lawrence (who went on to star in big-budget films such as Bad Boys and Big Momma’s House).
“There were a lot of risks being taken back then,” said Danielle Scruggs, who runs Black Women Directors, a digital catalog of films made by black women. “The films weren’t as didactic as they are today. Like House Party: here’s two teens who just want to throw the best party of the year. It’s this sliceof-life film. There’s no one looking at the camera and saying: ‘Black Lives Matter!’”
The forthcoming remake have black Hollywood’s brightest names attached. Issa Rae, star of the HBO sitcom Insecure, will reportedly produce Set It Off. The basketball star LeBron James will produce House Party through his new film and TV studio SpringHill Enter
tainment and the Black-ish creator, Kenya Barris, was hired in 2015 to pen a film version of the 70s sitcom Good Times.
“A classic is something new that feels familiar,” said the music video director Calmatic, who is helming the House Party remake. “I think that’s the formula a lot of these new projects are working with. Creating a new energy around a familiar entity.”
Calmatic’s childhood VHS collection, which included The Nutty Professor and Sister Act 2, highlights the importance of mainstream black films. “I haven’t even seen ‘classics’ like ET or Back to the Future,” the director of Lil Nas X’s music video Old Town Road said. “But what I do know are the two or three VHS tapes we had at my house. I watched Sister Act 2a million times.”
Hollywood is hoping to re-create some of this magic.
A boom of black films gradually declined during the late 90s and early 2000s. Black directors’ projects were often spaced out years apart (John Singleton, the esteemed late director of Boyz In the Hood, once had a sixyear hiatus) and studios invested little in their marketing. Eventually, the releases of black-centric films became special occasions.
“There hasn’t been a lot of these smaller-budget films – outside of what [the black writer and director] Tyler Perry has been doing – marketed to African American audiences recently,” says Jeffrey Bock, a box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations. “There’s definitely a hole in the marketplace and Hollywood has recognized it.”
Warner Bros learned how notto repackage a popular black franchise this summer with its ill-received Shaft reboot. Starring Samuel L Jackson as Shaft, the film was seen as being too different from its critically lauded predecessors and failed to capture an audience. “It was a pretty big flop for Warner Bros,” Bock says. “But the failure of that movie is not going to stop other reboots from being made. Studios have learned it’s better to take something that’s not so beloved and can be improved upon. That’s when a reboot is successful.”
Bocks predicts a film like House Party has the potential to kick off a series of copycat films targeted for black audiences. “If it hits – there will be a trend,” he says. “Because that’s how Hollywood works. It’s a cyclical industry. Stomp the Yard [released in 2007] is a great example of that. Dancing and stomping movies were a big trend for a long time.”
There is the valid concern a heavy focus on remakes and reboots will devalue the original ideas of black screenwriters and directors. Would a major studio pass up on an experimental script like Jordan Peele’s racial horror satire Get Outin favor of something tried and tested?
“I don’t really want to see reboots,” said Scruggs, followed by a groan. “There’s enough original ideas out there that haven’t been done before. I want to see thosestories told, instead of looking at the past.”
But the reboots trend is here, for black and white audiences now. As Bock said: “Anything nostalgic right now is gold.”
There’s definitely a hole in the marketplace and Hollywood has recognized it Box office analyst Jeffrey Bock