Movie remakes are most often objects of ridicule, suspicion, and scorn, with good reason. Unlike play revivals, musical covers, and everyone’s two favorite art forms (opera and ballet), people get nervous or annoyed when confronted with a new film “that’s already been done before.” A good remake can stand on its own and eclipse the original (Scarface, The Fly, The Thing), but rarely do the two share equal footing. Look at Disney’s recent “live action” remakes of its animated classics Snow White, The Lion King, and Moana: star Rachel Zegler trashed the film and its fans before its release, while Peter Dinklage, an actor in no way involved in the production, criticized the use of dwarves and managed to get Disney to spends hundreds of millions of dollars to rectify the situation, whatever the “situation” was. The trailer for Moana debuted on Monday and was roundly mocked; The Lion King made $1.65 billion just before the pandemic hit, and by the time Barry Jenkins’ sequel Mufasa hit theaters in late 2024, the trend was exhausted and he was also roundly mocked for wasting so much time and energy on a movie he never should’ve done in the first place.
It wasn’t necessarily better 25 years ago: The Italian Job, Get Carter, Shaft, The Manchurian Candidate, Walking Tall, The Longest Yard, The Bad News Bears, The In-Laws, and Planet of the Apes were all remade in quick succession, to varying results. Some of these movies did well, others bombed, but none replaced the movies they were based on. Steven Soderbergh pulled it off with Ocean’s Eleven; ditto Mark Waters with Freaky Friday. Even Frank Oz’s 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives gained a cult following on home video that endures today. Lost in the deluge was Nora Ephron’s Bewitched, a 2005 comedy based on the 1960s television series starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. I didn’t see Bewitched when it came out, despite being a fan of Kidman and Ferrell, because I never saw the show in reruns. The previous winter, I’d been burned by the Fat Albert movie, based on another show I never watched, and I got the sense that this Bewitched was worth skipping.
WRONG! I finally saw it a couple of years ago and the movie is due for a reevaluation. Avoiding typical strategies and pitfalls of movie remakes, Ephron’s Bewitched isn’t a remake, reboot, sequel, “reimagining,” or a riff on the show Bewitched, and Kidman doesn’t play Elizabeth Montgomery or Samantha Stephens. Her name is Isabel Bigelow, a real witch (with Michael Caine as her father), desperate to live a real life among regular people. We start with her shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond (a common brand in mid-2000s cinema, also appearing prominently in The Break-Up and Click), where her father appears out of nowhere to warn her that “regular life” isn’t that interesting, and she won’t be able to handle it anyway. She resolves to use her powers as little as possible, and quickly meets Jack Wyatt (Ferrell), a familiarly obnoxious and arrogant Hollywood prick high on his own supply. He’s in a slump, but looking to come back with a television reboot of the show Bewitched; when he sees Kidman wiggle her nose just like Samantha (and, presumably, all other real witches) in Book Soup, he knows he’s found the one.
Jack puts up with Isabel’s incompetence and unfamiliarity with life on Earth, but his patience and ego are tested when Isabel’s Samantha is an audience hit, while his character is loathed just as much as he is. After Isabel scores a 99 with a studio audience, and he scores a 32, Jack starts scheming to get rid of her, or tank the show on purpose so he’s not upstaged by this bizarre woman, so perfect and so inept in so many ways. Of course, they fall in love along the way—and patch things up once something inevitably gets in their way. They end up married, living in a house and neighborhood that clearly resemble that of the original series Bewitched.
Besides Steve Carrell’s cameo as Paul Lynde, Ephron’s Bewitched offers little “fan service” and never resorts to easy stunts to pad out its 102 minutes. Shirley MacLaine appears as Iris Smythson, an actress playing Endora who also happens to be a real witch. “Be careful with that,” she tells Isabel after she notices her using her powers on set. Ultimately, Isabel practices magic throughout the film, getting Jack to fall in and out of love with her, lowering the price of a home, and installing her own cable. However, her “struggle” to live as a real person without resorting to her powers as a witch is secondary to the behind the scenes focus of the story. Bewitched is as much a Hollywood film as Robert Altman’s The Player, or the more recent television series The Studio. Many of the supporting players—including Jason Schwartzman, David Alan Grier, and Stephen Colbert in one of his last film roles—play agents, managers, department heads, and yes-men. Unlike the original show, which ran from 1964-1972 and into infinity through reruns, Bewitched doesn’t explore the world of witches and warlocks that Isabel (and Samantha) long to leave—it’s more interested in the audience’s relationship to the series and other shows that once ruled our airwaves.
Bewitched is a very rare and beautiful thing: a work of art about itself, equally sincere and satirical, both the thing itself and its reverse. Only one other movie from around this time hit the same post: 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, ostensibly based on the comic book but starring Evan Rachel Wood, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid as a struggling pop punk band of the same name. When they’re discovered by Alan Cumming and Parker Posey, they’re put through the ringer of the music business circa Y2K, with producers and managers getting in the members’ heads and eventually brainwashing Wood’s Josie into thinking she’s the only member that matters. They’re just the latest in a line of overnight major label successes who’ve had subliminal messages mixed into their music telling everyone to buy Snapple and shop at Target. Although not as caustic or subversive as Josie and the Pussycats, Ephron’s Bewitched is a remarkable break from what was and is expected of movie remakes, reboots, and “origin stories.” Ephron would direct only one more film, 2009’s Julie & Julia, before dying in 2012 of leukemia. She was only 71, with at least another decade ahead of her, but after the critical and commercial drubbing of Bewitched, it’s unlikely she would’ve ever tried something so out there and, in her words, possessed by “that Pirandello thing.”
Why aren’t more movies about movies? Not movies about the movie industry, movies about movies, movies about themselves. We’re over a century into a culture raised on movie and television behavior, yet Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Williamson still stand out for their self-referential scripts full of cine-literate characters. This shouldn’t be an anomaly by now. If the movies are losing relevance, it’s because they’re no longer speaking the same language as their audience. So few movies deal with our own movie-saturated lives, and when something like Eddington actually pulls it off, people are blown away. And yet they don’t do it themselves.
The fourth wall is thinner than ever. The first person to seize on that will change movies forever.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith