As the remake train continues to roll this one shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as the title of the film alone tells us this one never ends. However, since Warner Bros. isn’t making another sequel to 1984’s The NeverEnding Story and in fact is planning on reboot, doesn’t that sort of seem like cheating?
Personally I have no interest in a remake of this film as it was probably my favorite film growing up. I must have watched The NeverEnding Story on HBO close to one hundred times, I just couldn’t get enough of it. The fantasy film centered on a young boy who discovers an extraordinary storybook-and the fantastical world within its pages. The boy’s life increasingly became intertwined with the plot of the novel, in which a hero in the land of Fantasia must save the universe on behalf of an empress.
Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line of Fire, Troy and Das Boot) directed the film which was based on the German-language novel by Michael Ende. George Miller (Happy Feet) directed a sequel in 1990 and even a third film directed by Peter MacDonald was released in 1994, but neither sequel gained much attention.
The Hollywood Reporter article announcing the project says the new film “will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first pic.” Considering the first pic was damn near perfect I guess it would only be proper they try something completely different, that’s Hollywood for you. It almost sounds like they are trying to make it more of an adult oriented picture. Perhaps I should applaud the idea of not making the same thing again, but if I had a child I would make sure they saw the original several times before ever introducing them to some glossy remake. The original is just too good to be tainted, at least for youngsters.
