The entire point in remaking a movie that was either trashed by critics or bombed at the box office – and in plenty of cases both – would surely be the belief that a second stab at the same source material would yield much better results. While we’ve got no doubt they tried, the creative team behind 2015’s Wild Card didn’t fare any better than their predecessors.
It only took a little over two years for William Goldman’s 1985 novel Heat to be adapted for the big screen, with Burt Reynolds headlining a $12 million production that found itself sinking without a trace on domestic shores after earning less than $3 million from theaters.
28 years later, the seemingly reliable team of Con Air director Simon West and action icon Jason Statham brought Wild Card to the fore, but the results were much the same. Despite being three times as expensive as its predecessor with an estimated budget of around $35 million, the formulaic action thriller didn’t even see the inside of a theater in the United States, while overseas earnings could only struggle to under $7 million.
Remaking a bomb and then watching it bomb even harder is an ironically impressive achievement, but much like the majority of Statham’s back catalogue, Wild Card continues to show longevity on streaming. Per FlixPatrol, the routine tale of the chrome-domed ass-kicker bludgeoning his way through an organized crime syndicate has cracked the most-watched charts of both Prime Video and Starz this week, but when was the last time anyone cared to rewatch Reynolds and his mustache in Heat?