IF YOU’RE GOING to remake a movie, you’d better have a good reason. In 1995, Harrison Ford did a remake of “Sabrina” because, at 53, he wanted to see if he could transition from action roles into romantic comedy (by way of an answer, his next two films were “The Devil’s Own” and “Air Force One”). Last year Steven Soderbergh remade “Ocean’s Eleven” because he had directed three difficult movies (“Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich,” and “The Limey”) in two years and wanted to try a romp. This weekend we have a remake of “Manhunter,” the movie “Red Dragon,” whose raison d’être is this business nugget: In 2001, the sequel to “Silence of the Lambs,” “Hannibal,” opened to $58 million on a non-holiday weekend–the highest opening-weekend ever for an R-rated movie.
Eager to capitalize on the continuing popularity of Anthony Hopkins’s performance as Hannibal Lecter, Dino De Laurentiis, who controls the Thomas Harris property, and his Universal Studios partners, cast about for another excuse to get Hopkins’s Lecter on screen. The problem was that “Hannibal” is the final chapter of the Lecter saga. The only way to give audiences more Lecter was to go back and remake the first Lecter movie, “Manhunter.”
