10 films they'd never get away with now (and not for the reasons you think)

Telegraph

2 days ago

Remakes are big business. If they weren't, we wouldn't get such a stultifying cascade of them on a more-or-less weekly basis. But for every Superman or Chronicles of Narnia, there is a beloved film from the past that simply could not be made in the present.
Sometimes this is because they are so specific to their moment that their views have become outdated (yesterday's playground is today's minefield). Other times, logistics are to blame: large-scale location shoots with many thousands of extras, of the type David Lean routinely employed for his epics, are now too expensive for an increasingly risk-averse industry to countenance. And then there are those wondrous moments in cinema that simply feel unrepeatable: surely no one would ever dare have another stab at Citizen Kane or anything by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.
Not every film in this list is great cinema by any means – indeed, some arguably shouldn't have been made in the first place; others are old-fashioned but still enjoyable; a couple are untouchable. None will come around ever again.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
A thousand soldiers from the Arab Legion, kindly donated by King Hussein of Jordan, 750 horses. 159 camels. The phrase 'they don't make 'em like they used to' might have been coined to describe David Lean's run of epics that began with The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957 and ended, eight years later, with Dr Zhivago.
In between, came Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a masterclass in techniques they don't use any more. Some operated on a vast scale: the 'attack on Aqaba' sequence, involving hundreds of horses, necessitated the construction of an entire town in the Jordanian desert. Others were more an exercise in precision: the famous entrance of Omar Sharif, at first no more than a shimmering mirage on the horizon, was testament to the unique gifts of Freddie Young, a cinematographer whose long-lens wizardry finds no equal today. Only a fool would attempt to repeat this kind of virtuosity. (Roland Emmerich, of all people – the computer-effects aficionado behind The Patriot, Anonymous, and other crimes against cinema – is reportedly trying to get a three-part TV adaptation off the ground.)
And then there is the script decision that would certainly disqualify the film from being green-lit now: in its three-hour-seven-minute run time Lawrence of Arabia includes not a single speaking part for a woman. Perhaps above all else, this ensures there can only ever be one Lawrence of Arabia.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
Who else but the Pythons could have got away with this irreverent retelling of the New Testament? Even they almost didn't: at the eleventh hour – after sets had been built in Tunisia and cameras were ready to roll – funding was pulled, when Lord 'Bernie' Delfont, the CEO of EMI Films, read the script and baulked. Thank God, then, for George Harrison, such a Python fan that he remortgaged his house to scrape together the £3m they needed.
On release, the film was banned outright in Ireland, and heavily suppressed by many councils in the UK. In Sweden they advertised it as 'so funny it was banned in Norway'. Orthodox rabbis and nuns alike picketed New York screenings. Evangelical politicians in the US wanted all the Pythons tried for blasphemy. The state of Georgia successfully banned the film for a half-second glimpse of Graham Chapman's penis.
Of course, the threatened hellfire did little to damage Life of Brian's box-office performance. (It was the UK's fourth highest-grossing film that year.) 'We were very cautious about offending any Muslims,' Terry Gilliam, who served as the art director, has confessed. 'At least getting the Catholics, Protestants and Jews all protesting against our movie was fairly ecumenical on our part.'
Despite the umbrage it triggered, the film's lampooning of Christianity is far from savage: Jesus himself is spared ridicule. It's tickling and mischievous, goosing the scriptures rather than ripping them to shreds. Yet the idea that any funding body would brave such massed religious objections now is barely imaginable.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Ordinary People (1980)
Robert Redford's directorial debut, which won four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director in 1981, is about the gradual disintegration of an upper-middle-class family in Illinois, after one of two sons drowns in a boating accident, and the other (played by Best Supporting Actor winner Timothy Hutton) attempts suicide. The parents (Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland) confront the tragic breakdown of their marriage, while Conrad (Hutton) goes through extensive therapy and embarks on a tentative relationship with a fellow student (Elizabeth McGovern).
In other words, the script is simply too attuned to what any studio executive today would identify as 'white people problems' – a current fast-track to the wastepaper basket. For years, it was fashionable to deride Redford's film as a sudsy, safe enshrinement of picket-fence values, which admittedly takes few aesthetic risks. Along with Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and On Golden Pond (1981), it could be said to epitomise gauzy white liberal soul-searching as America was on the cusp of the Reagan years. Some never forgave it for pipping Raging Bull to those Oscars.
Yet here's the newsflash: Ordinary People is actually excellent, despite all the above considerations. If it does take a risk, it's for holding its ground without cringing, by not letting a family's obvious privilege disqualify them from being the focus of a pained, affecting story. While this brand of drama may have looked as modish as big hair in 1980, it certainly doesn't any more.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Heaven's Gate (1980)
Say the words 'Heaven's Gate' to a certain generation of Hollywood executive, and they'll look like they've seen a ghost. With The Deer Hunter (1978), director Michael Cimino managed to turn a gruelling, three-hour nightmare about the scars of Vietnam into an Oscar-winning commercial triumph. The credit this earned him was blown in one fell swoop on his next project, a numbingly beautiful western about an obscure land dispute in 1890s Wyoming.
Following a location search across 20,000 miles to find the most exquisite scenery, Cimino chose the parklands of Montana, and banned executives from United Artists from visiting the set. Journalists, too: one called Les Gapay snuck in undercover by posing as an extra and reported on the chaos that allowed the film's budget to balloon from $11m to more than $44m (well over $170m in today's dollars), even before prints and advertising. After the film grossed a pitiful $3.5m worldwide, United Artists had to be sold off to MGM.
And then there is the on-set animal abuse: steers were bled from the neck as a source of stage blood; real cockfights were initiated; and cows were disembowelled to provide intestines. Four horses were killed during the climactic battle scene, including one that was blown up by dynamite.The outcry surrounding all this gave the American Humane Association a legal mandate to step in on Hollywood productions, and the 'no animals were harmed' disclaimer became an important feature of end credits.
Streaming on Prime Video
Tootsie (1982)
Tootsie is probably more beloved than anything else Sydney Pollack directed. It may be Dustin Hoffman's most inspired comic role, while the supporting cast – Bill Murray, Teri Garr, Charles Durning, Dabney Coleman, Pollack himself, and an Oscar-winning Jessica Lange – is pretty much unequalled in a 1980s studio comedy. Yet, in the harsh light of 2025, the film's barmy premise sounds eye-rollingly absurd. Boiled down, it's that a man's professional opportunities dry up, so he disguises himself as a woman to get ahead.
It's worth saying that no part of the film is suggesting that women, in general, have it easier in the workplace. Hoffman's character, a jobbing actor in New York called Michael Dorsey, has scuppered his reputation by being fussy and difficult, so his solution is really any disguise; it just so happens that the role of a female hospital administrator, on the daytime soap Southwest General, is up for grabs. In steps his creation, the buttoned-down 'Dorothy Michaels', whose businesslike feminism makes her a nationwide sensation.
Alas, one-line dismissals of an eccentric concept – 'Man teaches women womanhood' might be one – are harder to combat in our era of cancellation phobia. And while Michael/Dorothy is not transgender, the 'man in a dress' setup, which provides its own punchlines, treats gender-swapping as a big joke, which wouldn't go down at all well now. It's hard to contemplate how they would begin to pitch this plot today without panic and pearl-clutching killing it off.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Police Academy (1984-94)
From 1984-1994, the defining image of American police on cinema screens was this bunch of dumb, incompetent horndogs. One or two are black, including Moses Hightower (played by 6'7' Bubba Smith) whose main character traits, as you can tell from his name, are being tall and black.
The first film was the most successful for Warner Bros – the fifth-biggest hit of 1984, no less – and each sequel grossed less than the last. Critics, who hadn't even liked the first one much, could only rattle their chains and wail about the series grinding on and on.
This barrel-scraping franchise was arguably the closest American equivalent, in its ruttish tone and unapologetic sexism, to the Carry On series, which would be comparably difficult to revive now. I don't know many people who would voluntarily watch Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989) in the expectation of having a good time.
Even if this weren't the case, the tiniest of glances at the current conversation about US policing would be enough to rule out a Police Academy revival. There have definitely been more propitious moments to treat cops as ineffectual figures of fun.
The last time original star Steve Guttenberg made noises about a new sequel, it was 2018. He has been strikingly quiet since 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin triggered the largest protests against police brutality since the Rodney King riots in 1992. As the BLM movement took to the streets, even NBC's much savvier, less slapstick cops-are-idiots sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-2021) had to throw four episodes straight in the trash, and terminated its run the following year. On all fronts, Police Academy is about as ripe for a revival as Bernard Manning.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is best remembered as the first star vehicle for Jim Carrey, one of three smash hits in 1994 (along with The Mask and Dumb and Dumber) which catapulted him to the top of the A-list, and within two years made him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.
It is less fondly remembered for a third-act reveal which even the far-from-woke Joe Rogan has labelled 'insanely transphobic'. There is no way it would fly any more: even in 1994 it was more or less a hate crime. The twist is that the film's antagonist Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), a mocking, corrupt, sexually voracious Miami police lieutenant, is secretly a man – namely, a disgraced ex-American-footballer called Ray Finkle. Ace, who puzzles this out after kissing Lois, goes into a paroxysm of revulsion, burning his clothes in a trash can, crying in the shower, and trying to wash out his mouth with a toilet plunger. When the bulge tucked between Young's legs is then revealed, every onlooker who has lusted in her direction spontaneously retches.
All a big no-no now – and rightly so. Sensibilities have swung well wide of making transgender characters the butt of such mean-spirited jokes, or even plot twists (as in The Crying Game). Even when they're centred sympathetically, controversies have continued to arise from casting cisgender actors in transgender roles. Eddie Redmayne was Oscar-nominated for playing Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl (2015), but after mounting backlash has since admitted this was a 'mistake', and not one he would make any more.
Ace Ventura and The Danish Girl: a double bill awaiting in hell for cinephiles right there. At least no one will live to see either film repeated.
Streaming on Netflix and NOW
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
This gleefully vicious 'mockumentary' on beauty pageants has gone from castigated bomb to cult favourite over the years – yet its bad-taste comic stylings would be unlikely to slip through a US studio's sensitivity net now. The film charts the rivalry among a bevy of wannabe high school beauty queens in Minnesota, competing in what's called the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Mount Rose American Teen Princess Pageant. Only in Minnesota!
Kirsten Dunst plays the heroine Amber, a solemn striver who works in a morgue, and lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother (Ellen Barkin). The queen bitch, naturally, is played by Denise Richards; her own mother (Kirstie Alley) is not above causing horrifying 'accidents' with threshing machines or making people's trailers explode.
This carnage is all rendered so matter-of-factly as to be quite bracing: it is feel-bad-for-laughing comedy at its cruellest. One contestant is rendered deaf by a falling stage light. Richards does a beatific ballroom dance with a crucified dummy of Jesus. An episode of (deliberate?) food poisoning at a shellfish buffet causes a prolonged scene of synchronised spewing. Meanwhile, the reigning champion has been hospitalised with acute anorexia, and is wheeled on to do – eek! – a victory lap from her wheelchair. It gets very, very dark.
No one now would green-light anorexia jokes. Even on release, the film was savaged by male critics, who, to a man, compared it unfavorably with Michael Ritchie's Smile (1975), a much subtler satirical comedy. The unfiltered sadism of Drop Dead Gorgeous gained it the last laugh, though. It became a staple of the DVD rental era, with many avowed fans, many of them women. The likes of New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino has declared it 'possibly my favourite movie of all time'. Giddy and grotesque, it's the definition of a one-off.
Streaming on Prime Video and PLEX
Tropic Thunder (2008)
he most notorious joke in Ben Stiller's 2008 comedy is the sight of Robert Downey Jr in blackface, as an Australian Method actor called Kirk Lazarus, who is playing a cigar-chomping African-American Marine in the film-within-the-film. He has not just used bootblack (like Peter Sellers in The Party) but had 'pigmentation surgery' to darken his skin (temporarily) for the role.
The joke is, obviously, on the lengths to which actors will go to scoop awards. Kirk, ludicrously, has won five Oscars and counting. Objecting that he'd be instantly cancelled for this routine – I can hear fans of the film already cry – is missing the point. It's satire, it's exaggeration, it's – again – ludicrous. The whole film is meant to be a trip. Only Downey's weirdly sincere commitment to the bit allows Tropic Thunder to get away with it at all. He never signals that it's all a joke.
Yet Stiller has recently admitted that it would be 'incredibly dicey' in today's climate to attempt that character, 'ironic' blackface and all. Stiller would also get into hot water with the parodic figure of Simple Jack, the I-Am-Sam-esque caricature whom his character, Tug Speedman, is shown playing. By signalling 'it's a joke!' relentlessly, Stiller's at pains to reassure us that actors, not the developmentally disabled, are the butt of the humour there.
The script enjoys dishing out the word 'retarded' with dubious abandon, though Downey has absolute deadpan control over the most famous line: 'Never go full retard'. Should you be in the mood, you could also slam Tom Cruise's fulminating mogul Les Grossman for crass anti-Semitism, and the entire Asian supporting cast for being lazily stereotyped. There are simply too many ways to cancel Tropic Thunder for it to go anywhere near production now – a fact which probably inclines fans to love it all the more.
Streaming on Prime Video, NOW and Paramount+
Green Book (2018)
One of the most contentious Best Picture winners of the past few decades, Peter Farrelly's film left critics slack-jawed with its therapeutic vision of race relations. Spike Lee called it 'not his cup of tea', and you can very much see why. Its plot can be summed up as: 'Bigoted white man learns, through the eye-opening power of an inter-racial friendship, to accept a black man's humanity.'
That is, admittedly, reductive, and doesn't take into account the calibre of the lead performances. Mahershala Ali, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, has majestic, dolorous presence to spare as the classical pianist Don Shirley, who toured the South in 1962. Viggo Mortensen delivers a seriously professional and nuanced turn as Shirley's driver/bodyguard Tony Vallelonga.
The Academy, consistently charged with white bias, leapt at Green Book, not least because it seeks to solve the kind of problems of which they've always been accused. The trouble is that it makes the solution appear too easy. The film pre-dates the aggrieved activism of 2020 and has come to look ten times more pandering since. Today, no film could peddle its message unselfconsciously. Even voters who used it to 'disprove' their racism may look back with a degree of embarrassment. So while Green Book could have been quite a lot worse, it has still managed to guarantee that no white filmmaker will be treating us to a buddy flick about 'fixing' racism any time soon.