It's hard to believe that the remake machine is still in full effect, but it is, and the latest example of it is Videodrome.

Yes you read that right, Universal Pictures are going to remake David Cronenberg's Videodrome. That's the film that starred James Woods and had him pulling a gun out of his stomach and being sucked into a television.

Videodrome is a 1983 film from David Cronenberg that sees James Woods play the head of a television channel who sees a private video called Videodrome, a series that shows torture and murder and garners a huge audience, and decides that he wants it for his channel. While investigating it he, and his girlfriend, get drawn into something much deeper, something that involves the use of television to control the minds of those who watch it.

It's a great film, and it's very fair to say that visually it looks dated, although story wise it still remains very relevant, and the story from Variety very clearly states that the film is going to be radically updated.

The modernised script is going to look at nano-technology and it will become a “large-scale sci-fi action thriller.”, dashes aplenty.

Now I don't know what you think, hence the article so we can find out, but I'm thinking that launching this into a big scale action science fiction film is kind of losing the heart of the original a little.

That scale is reflected in the writer, Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, now there's a thought.

Let's be fair though, he has a number of smaller horror type films to his writing credits including The Ring and The Ring Two, The Skeleton Key, The Brothers Grimm, and the upcoming The Talisman mini-series.

This doesn't feel right to me, and I think we're going to lose the subtleties and the social commentary for big budget effects and action.

The article points out that David Cronenberg has no role in the film as yet, which I don't find surprising and would wonder if he would want a role in it. Would you want to even see it?