Lots of people—including Cary Elwes—have thoughts on the idea of a Princess Bride reboot
For many people, there are few adventure movies more exuberantly pure than Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, a film that combines so many of cinema’s great pleasures: Romance, sword-fighting, witty banter, Carol Kane slapping the crap out of Billy Crystal, and more. The 1987 movie is beloved by a whole generation of movie-goers, which makes it—and anyone who’s paid any sort of attention to the movie-making landscape in recent years will probably see the next clause of this sentence coming from a depressingly predictable distance—prime territory for the Hollywood Remake Machine to suck the life out of for its own dark purposes.
Now, before various permutations of “Inconceivable!” come racing to people’s lips, let’s be very clear: The only concrete hint that such a project is being considered comes from a single line in a recent Variety profile of executive producer/former Meathead employer Norman Lear, in which Sony Pictures head Tony Vinciquerra referred to “Very famous people whose names I won’t use” that want “to redo The Princess Bride.” That discretion was probably a smart call, because even this merest whiff of Peter Falk-profaning blasphemy has set the “Bow to the queen of putrescence!” crowd well and truly off.
Chief among them: Star Cary Elwes and Mrs. Count Rugen herself, Jamie Lee Curtis, both of whom let their feelings on the topic be known on social media.
The fan responses have been even more aggressive, which is interesting so far as, again, this isn’t actually a project that anybody seems to be pursuing except in the most hypothetical of senses. Still, it’s not like ’80s movie fans haven’t been burned before—our sympathies to all the Overboard fanatics still reeling from their recent indignities—and so a little pre-preemptive outrage doesn’t feel entirely out of the question, either.