DISTURBIA recently just won a court case where it was ruled that it did NOT infringe on Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW despite mimicking practically the entire plot. Because they were teens, and they played Xbox and they had an Asian friend, it was said to be dissimilar enough without stealing the idea completely.
Well, on the heels of that, a teenage remake (err “reworking”) of another Hitchcock film, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, is moving ahead from Slingshot Productions and BBC films. The movie is tentatively titled TEENS ON A TRAIN, but good lord, they have to change that before it’s actually released. Even for a working title though, yeesh.
The original film based on a Patricia Highsmith novel follows two men who meet randomly on a train. They both have troublesome people in their lives they want dead, and the agree to kill their other’s problem and believe they can get away with it because each has no motive. What could go wrong?
I’m wondering what the teenage equivalent of this would possibly look like, but if you told me to do a teenage version of REAR WINDOW, I probably wouldn’t be smart enough to think of what we saw in DISTURBIA. Could prove interesting? Maybe?
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