What do I think they should do? Funny you ask. Here are a handful of seemingly unrelated points (but stick with them, I'm going somewhere interesting):
-Much like the video games industry, Hollywood is not actually out of new ideas, but is unwilling to throw lots of money at anything with a hint of risk.
-Adding on to an established series (even if there's only one entry) is a much riskier proposition than executives seem to think; you do have a (virtually) guaranteed audience, but they're there because they liked the original, and any changes you make are going to piss someone off; the changes that're actually good are no exception.
-Said good changes are also really, really hard to predict.
-There are, to the best of my knowledge, only three good movies with "two thousand" in the title.
-"Death Race 2000" is not one of them. But what it lacks in overall quality it makes up for in campy charm; go in expecting that and you can still enjoy it.
-Nonetheless, Hollywood remade it into "Death Race" in 2008; they took out the campy humor and ramped up the grittiness.
-It sucked, but no one really cared.
That last point is key, and illustrates why I'm suggesting what I'm going to suggest. A well-loved title brings big publicity. But screw up a good thing, and people will hate you for it. The solution? Take a big-name, publicity-generating title that wasn't good, and bring people in with the promise of "we can't do any worse!", and the unspoken promise of glorious schadenfreude if you somehow do. Yes, I'm suggesting that id remake Daikatana. They can't do any worse! Plus:
-Death Race 2000 did get a video game made of it, which was remade in 1990, proving that the industry could handle a good deal of controversy (in light of everything that has happened since, that statement seems absolutely laughable, but remember that things were very different back then), which signaled the all-clear for Grand Theft Auto. Just think what a Daikatana remake could get us!
