Those Van Damme Remakes!

Action remakes, on the whole, are few and far between. Yes Statham did The Mechanic, The Rock did Walking Tall, Samuel Jackson had a crack at Shaft, Stallone tried to do Get Carter and there are a handful of driving ones like The Italian Job, Death Race and Gone in 60 Seconds but when compared to the horror genre, for example, action doesn't get the rape and plunder treatment very often.
There's a good reason for this.
The reason is that the action genre has always been happy to have its box full of bona fide original classics and then it's a thousand imitators.
You've got a million mercenary/man on a mission movies, a million one man against a thousand nameless terrorist movies and, of course, you've got your competition/martial arts movies.
You know what you're getting and you get what you want but the best thing about all this was that the action genre was always happy to rename, recast and re-situate their films. They'd set it in a different place or, even, in a different time, they'd add a new character beat or a back story that wasn't there before and, bingo! a brand new film.

So it is with much grinding of the teeth, pulling out of hair and sheer brain-numbing, slack jawed amazement at the pointlessness of it all that I shudder to announce remakes of not just Bloodsport but also Kickboxer.
James McTiegue, the man behind V For Vendetta will helm Bloodsport with a script by Taken's Mark Kamen. It doesn't matter that there are already 4 Bloodsports, 8 Bloodfists and 4 Best of the Bests (not to mention a gazillion other similar titles), they have decided, in their infinite wisdom to still call this film Bloodsport even though it's not about Frank Dux, it's set in Australia and Rio De Janeiro and it's all about Brazil's Vale Tudo martial art.
Van Damme has apparently shown interest in appearing in the film but Kamen made this rather ridiculous, slightly pompous and rather harsh statement against that happening:
“This is a character driven, politically motivated film. It has nothing to do with splits or muscles or grudge matches and as I said, if the title were not attached to the rights, you would not associate one film with the other.” - Source: Slashfilm
SO it's NOT Bloodsport then is it??!! So DON'T call it Bloodsport!!

Which brings us to Kickboxer, of which there are already 5 in the series! It appears to be an even more pointless remake considering they are remaking Bloodsport and, let's be fair, the concepts are not so miles apart. All we know about the Kickboxer reboot right now is its director, Stephen Fung who made Tai Chi Zero.

I don't know what to think. I mean I love having more action movies and I would love to see the revitalisation of the fight-competition genre but would it be so hard to give these movies different names at the very least?

I am going to leave you with some words from Chris (with a C) who is one half of the fantastic team who bring you the simply radiant and sublime WAFU FM podcast. WHICH YOU SHOULD ALL BE LISTENING TO EVERY WEEK!
He writes:
There are certain films that you don't need the remake rights, and the name, to remake...Kickboxer is one of them. There are about 20 films that, plot wise at least, are almost identical to Kickboxer that aren't remakes. So why bother? It's not like Kickboxer is a well known instantly recognizable name unless you're a Van Damme fan...in which case you're probably not very interested in a fucking remake of Kickboxer.

And as for the guy in the comments who seems to be seriously suggesting Taylor Lautner for the lead role...shame on you, sir. Fucking shame on you. Shame....I can't believe any grown man would suggest that guy for any movie, never mind a remake of Kickboxer. God, I hate people.

~Chris

I really couldn't put it better myself (and I tried!)
- The Kick Ass Kid