Little Shop of Horrors is a story about a man-eating plant that’s been around for quite a while. It started off as a silly Roger Corman movie from the early ’60s, but even before that, Corman’s work is thought to have been inspired by a John Collier story called “Green Thoughts” from the ’30s. What most of us probably think of as Little Shop of Horrors comes from the ’80s, however. In 1982 Alan Menken and Howard Ashmen wrote a stage musical based on Corman’s black comedy, and then in 1986 Frank Oz directed a film version of their musical. As strange and campy as it is, Oz’s version of Little Shop still has quite a few fans to this day, so would it be considered an atrocity for someone to remake it?
Maybe not, because, according to THR, the someone who’s newly responsible for trying to get a remake of Little Shop together is none other than Internet darling Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That guy’s so cute and talented, we can’t be mad at him, can we?
Word is that Gordon-Levitt is putting the project together to serve as a starring vehicle for himself, which means he would be playing the Rick Moranis role of Seymour, the put-upon florist who finds that his life starts getting better the more he keeps the carnivorous talking plant that serves as the story’s MacGuffin growing. Wicked producer Marc Platt is said to also be on board in a producing role and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has been hired to get together a script.
So, which is it, wise readers? Are we giving Gordon-Levitt a pass because of everything he’s done for us already, and because this story has already been redone a few times before? Or does the word “remake” still serve as cause enough for us to sharpen our knives and verbally attack these vile pushers of non-originality with extreme prejudice?