Hey Hollywood, Please Don't Soften Up Badass Characters!
I went and saw Universal Pictures' Dracula Untold last weekend, and not only was I extremely disappointed in the story and script, but their portrayal of Dracula was absurd. Dracula is a badass character, he's suppose to be a very scary dude, and even the real life person that he's based on, Vlad, is just as terrifying, maybe even more so! That is a man that should be feared. Unfortunately, the people who made Dracula Untold removed all of that from this character. They made him a soft heroic person that absolutely does not strike fear in the hearts of men. Dracula is supposed to be a villain. The furthest they should take him away from that would be to make him an anti-hero, but they didn't even play with that notion. I will say that Luke Evans played the part fantastically! It was just the way that the character was portrayed that was wrong. Had Evan played a sinister Dracula, he probably would have been even better.
This is supposed to be the start of a Universal Monster cinematic universe, and now I'm afraid the rest of the movies the studio plans on making — Wolfman, Mummy, Frankenstein, and others — are going to be extremely lackluster. After seeing this film, there's no excitement for me to see the others. These Universal monsters are supposed to be scary, but the 1930s version of Dracula was way creepier than the character we saw in Untold. Just for comparison sake, Francis Ford Coppola's version of the monster played by Gary Oldman was absolutely terrifying.
Hollywood has been on this PG-13 kick. The reason for this is the studio accountants. They are the people that really run Hollywood and decide the fates of the movies that studios make. There's this belief that PG-13 movies will make more money because it expands the audience scope. In the process of doing that though they sacrifice character elements. There have recently been reports of Deadpool and Terminator: Genisys being PG-13 films. Anyone that knows these franchises knows that they should be rated 'R'. To make those ratings, filmmakers will have to sacrifice attributes of these characters that make them edgy. What's interesting about this is that last weekend David Fincher's rated-R movie Gone Girl beat Universal's PG-13 Dracula Untold at the box office.
I just don't want to see a trend of seeing classic hardcore characters lack of what made them badass in the first place. RoboCop is another character that lost some of his heat in the remake, and I still don't think Wolverine has reached his full potential. As you may have heard, Sylvester Stallone is currently developing Rambo 5, could you imagine Rambo in a PG-13 movie? Hell, the Wolverine movies that have been made should have been more like those older Rambo films. Stallone recently made a PG-13 Expendables movie, which I think hurt the movie at the box office more than helped. There's always the chance that he could make a PG-13 Rambo film. I hope that's not the case, but with the way studios are running things it seems likely.
Are there any other characters that you can think of who you feel have been toned down for film?