Remakes are an accepted fact of life, and it’s something we’ve all gotten used to as the never-ending deluge continues. Plenty of them have been worthy of living up to – or in some cases bettering – their illustrious predecessors, but what ranks as the worst of the worst; the very bottom of a barrel that should have never been scraped to begin with? It’s an open-ended question without a doubt, but 2002’s Rollerball should never be left out of the conversation.
The director of Die Hard and Predator mounting a $75 million reinterpretation of the 1975 cult classic sounded like a decent enough idea on paper, but John McTiernan had long since gone off the boil as one of the action genre’s top talents. Handing Chris Klein a blockbuster leading man role seemed doomed from the start, though, but at least he delivered on that front.
Rollerball absolutely cratered at the box office by barely even recouping half of its production costs, while a three percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes to go along with a 14 percent user rating make it patently clear that it’s never going to be embraced as a tongue-in-cheek camp favorite.
In fact, Redditors have been tasked to name the single worst remake in the recorded history of cinema, and what’s emerged as the most popular reply by a country mile? Yep, it’s Rollerball. A fetishistic nu metal escapade made by a middle-aged man and shot with no conviction whatsoever always seemed doomed to fail, and if it isn’t the worst do-over there’s ever been, then it’s definitely damn close.