My wife and I just finished watching the original Wuthering Heights movie, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (1939), and then the latest version of this film starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie (2026). There has been some debate about the newer film, as it doesn't hold up to the original. Though both movies take different approaches, I really did not feel one was better than the other. The newer movie is more stylish and toxic, with character portrayals that are quite raw, especially from Margot Robbie. The original was more ghostly and romantic.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because it feels like we’ve hit a point in entertainment where our cultural "classics" are being recycled at an accelerated rate. We see these properties reimagined over and over again; sometimes they are massive hits that breathe new life into an old story, and other times they are even bigger misses that fail to capture the original or any magic, for that matter.

That said, I’ve realized that I truly value remakes that have the courage to be daring and different. It’s what made these classics classics from the start.

“Jim Morrison is a drunken buffoon posing as a poet. Give me The Guess Who! They have the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic!” - Lester Bangs