Ghost is getting a remake – what is Hollywood thinking?

Who in their right mind would remake Ghost? The Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore weepie, about a man protecting his sweetheart from beyond the grave, was a phenomenon in 1990, with its legion of fans considering it near-sacred. That hasn’t put off Channing Tatum, though, who’s been developing a reboot of the film since 2023. Unmoved by the idea? Moore just last week poured cold water on the project in an interview with Variety. “There are some films better left alone,” she said.

I find it hard to disagree with her. But not quite for the same reasons. Ghost ranks with the most glutinous and manipulative tearjerkers in living memory – the cinematic equivalent of sticky, ectoplasmic gunge. Its five Oscar nominations notwithstanding, Ghost was never a classic. With its lachrymose music (a mix of Maurice Jarre and the Righteous Brothers), endless shots of tears running down Moore’s cheeks and all those fetishistic close-ups of Swayze’s very buff ethereal body, the film was short on substance from the outset.

But what can’t be overlooked is the insidious way the film has continued to haunt pop culture as a whole. It’s been remade in Japan and inspired a stage musical. There have been numerous spoofs of its most famous sequence – that erotic grapple between Swayze and Moore at a pottery wheel to the cloying tune of “Unchained Melody”. Hardened rappers swear by it, too, with Notorious BIG and Method Man among the artists to have cited either the film or its leading man in their lyrics.

Originally, Ghost endured many battles on its path to the big screen. If it hadn’t been for the earlier success of the original Beetlejuice (1988), it may never have even been greenlit. After all, studio execs were wary about spooking their audiences with material that, if mishandled, could seem morbid in the extreme.

Bruce Joel Rubin’s screenplay went through multiple drafts. In hindsight, you can easily understand why it was so hard to get right. Ghost was a strange hybrid – a crime thriller and a melodrama, an earthbound romance and a supernatural fantasy. And with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. Rubin initially came to the concept after seeing a production of Hamlet. “Imagine somebody in 20th century America being told by a ghost to avenge a death,” he recalled later. “That fascinated me. I had a story.”

In depicting Swayze leaving his own dead body behind him, Rubin also drew on memories of a bad LSD trip. He described the experience as if he were “hanging over the edge of a skyscraper, looking at the ground below, and at the moment you leap you are frozen in that space and terror.”

Rubin initially hoped for a heavyweight like Milos Forman or even Stanley Kubrick to direct his script. He ended up with Jerry Zucker, then best known for comedy spoofs Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret! (1984). But it wasn’t an enormous leap. As Moore perceptively surmised later on, Ghost was actually three films in one: a love story, a thriller and a comedy. “I thought this could be absolutely disastrous or it could be amazing,” she’s said.

In the film’s early stages, we’re introduced to young Wall Street banker Sam (Swayze) and his artist girlfriend Molly (Moore) – Manhattan yuppies who are madly in love. But then Sam is mugged and murdered. His ghost stays in limbo to protect Molly from an organised crime syndicate. Helping both of them is Oda Mae Brown (an uproarious Whoopi Goldberg, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance). Oda is a fake medium who makes a living by pretending to summon spirits back from beyond the grave. The twist comes when she suddenly discovers she actually can communicate with the recently deceased Sam.

open image in gallery

It’s no wonder Ghost was such a smash. It clearly tapped into a primal fascination cinemagoers have with the great beyond. Moore has talked about “the profound effect” the film exercised on “people who have lost someone.” Helpfully, this demographic includes, well, all of humanity.

Then there was the Swayze factor. Appearing on the heels of his turns in Dirty Dancing (1987) and Road House (1989), the star was at the very top of his game. He wasn’t, though, the first choice for the role: bigger names including Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis had both turned Ghost down. Swayze makes the most of the film: his army of fans can enjoy all the scenes in which he shows off his pecs (he was voted “sexiest man alive” shortly after the film’s release), and can also marvel at the emotional depth he brings to what could easily have been a bland part.

“What I knew about Patrick was that he was a man of real sensitivity and heart,” the film’s casting director Jane Jenkins tells me. “He wasn’t just a Texas cowboy. He was a ballet dancer.”

The film’s producers, meanwhile, went to exhaustive lengths to ensure Ghost was believable on its own terms. “We studied every ghost movie ever made,” the film’s executive producer Steven-Charles Jaffe remembers. “The successful ones had established rules – how a ghost goes through walls [and so forth].” He credits editor Walter Murch with the ingenious “ink blotter effect” that the film repeatedly uses whenever Sam touches a solid object like a wall – his hand seems to bleed into it.

open image in gallery

There’s a lot of craft, then, behind the project. For better or worse, this helped it put a spell on viewers. Ghost was a film that, at the time it came out, you either loved or loved to hate – and Moore and Swayze were the most compellingly doomed romantic couple of the Nineties, at least until Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet encountered that iceberg a few years later. You couldn’t ignore the picture even if its terminal mawkishness did bring you out in hives. It was part of the conversation, a date movie that doubled as a two-hour counselling session on how to cope with grief and loss.

How will Channing Tatum give a meaningful new shape to Ghost? Answers remain spookily spectral so far. He told Vanity Fair that he would be getting rid of the “problematic stereotypes”, at least, but didn’t specify exactly what those were.

But it’s further arguable that it’s a completely terrible idea to revisit the film. No one is likely to be happy with the results. The die-hard fans of the original will regard the prospect with horror and view it as potentially disrespectful to the memory of Swayze, who died in 2009. And then there are people like me – if we found the first one hard to stomach, we’re hardly eager for a second helping decades later.