Once upon a time, there was a movie about sexy pot-throwing. I mean, I guess it wasn’t really about that, but it’s what many of us remember about Ghost. (Though my fellow Mollys may remember a different moment.) Starring Patrick Swayze as a ghost who is trying to save his girlfriend (Demi Moore) from his enemies, and Whoopi Goldberg as the psychic who helps, Ghost was a massive hit in 1990.
So, naturally, Channing Tatum has his eyes on a remake.
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In a recent Vanity Fair story, Tatum says that his production company has the rights to Ghost, and that he may play the Patrick Swayze role. He also says, “we’re going to do something different,” regarding some of the stereotypes in the original, thirty-three-year-old film.
Ghost was written by Bruce Joel Rubin, who also wrote Deep Impact and the movie adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Director Jerry Zucker is also the man behind Airplane!, Ruthless People, and—I am not making this oddball list of movies up, I swear—First Knight.
Tatum, who was recently fairly endearing in The Lost City, above, has little to say about the Ghost remake, perhaps because he is distracted by the pottery lesson he and the Vanity Fair writer are taking when the topic comes up:
Moments later, he has produced another small vessel. “Now I know why they put this in Ghost,” he says, then smooths out the lip of a piece he notes looks rather like a vagina. “This whole process is very, very sexual.”
Is Channing Tatum the person the world needs to remake Ghost? Does the good sir, whose Magic Mike’s Last Dance is mere weeks from arriving in theaters, need more reasons to take off his shirt? Could we not just seat Whoopi Goldberg at that pottery wheel and let her tell the story? At any rate, Tatum’s Ghost is just a developmental dream at this point. (Though perhaps not as doomed as Tatum’s long-in-development Gambit movie, about which he says “We call every once in a while, but we’ve got to spiritually, emotionally, kind of mentally let it go.”) We’ll see if it takes physical form.
