Since I happen to like the LoEG movie (nothing mindblowing, but good dumb fun--I've yet to read the comics), your example is meaningless to me.

As much as I consider Harry Knowles of AICN to be a sellout (the way he slit the throats of every Superman fan on Earth by letting himself get slipped into Jon Peters and JJ Abrams' pocket), his view on The War Of The Worlds is one that I fully agree with:

Now, I love the original George Pal version to death. Those Al Nozaki Ships just blew my mind as a child and today. Watching an I.B. Tech print of the original in 35mm is simply one of the greatest geek joys in life. I also feel that WAR OF THE WORLDS is Pal's towering achievement in filmmaking. However, unlike his TIME MACHINE, which I felt should never be remade, WAR OF THE WORLDS is one that I welcome a revisit to.

Why? Don't we have a column on this site that highlights the futility of remakes? Why would I be for a remake of WAR OF THE WORLDS?

Call me idealistic, but I believe that H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS has never been made. The original was set around the turn of the century. Mankind on Earth didn't have jets or gas-powered vehicles. WAR OF THE WORLDS was pre-WWI. The idea of an invasion from another planet at that stage of human history would have been terrifying. Ya couldn't just hook up your APPLE to the dashboard of a stolen Alien fighter and upload a virus. Heck, you couldn't even try to drop Nukes on them.
I've also dreamed my whole life of seeing those Tripod War Machines... the Black Gas Clouds of death... The rays... All the horror of a vision of earthly nightmares visited upon a world on the verge of great scientific discoveries. A world still very large and isolated. A world that still depended heavily on Horse and Buggy and Steam Powered Trains.

Updating WAR OF THE WORLDS to the here and now would be futile... Suddenly you would have something of a slight variation of INDEPENDENCE DAY or MARS ATTACKS! or others of their type....

At this point, Cruise/Wagner and Paramount Pictures have no writers or directors attached to the project. I just hope that when they bring people on, it is to make the film that the readers of H.G. Wells' classic work of science fiction have been dreaming of for well over a 100 years and have never seen on the silver screen. And whatever they do, let's hope they don't f**k it up like DREAMWORKS did THE TIME MACHINE!!!!

The point being, a modern-day WotW has been done already...several times (once bearing the name). We've been over this before. And frankly, it's gotten tired. And doing it again would be useless, a rehash of the Pal version that isn't necessary or even wanted. You might as well just buy the DVD instead and be done with it. Many in Hollywood have been DYING to do a WotW film set in the 1898 England setting. They've wanted to do it for years, but weren't able to because the FX technology wasn't up to the task until now. Legend has it that Cecil B. DeMille bailed out of making the 1953 film version because they couldn't do it as it was written in the book (the most he did was serve as an uncredited producer). Most fans of the book WANT the new version to be set in the original time period. And why not, especially if Spielberg's thinking of joining the project? If anyone can make a quality retro-style sci-fi war movie, it's Spielberg (although Peter Jackson and Gore Verbinski would be more than up to the task as well).

Further, the whole point of the book was that it was written as a critique of British imperialism. Wells was royally pissed about the massacre of the Zulu people, and he wrote WotW to show the English how unpleasant it would be for them if an advanced culture came along and decided to kill them all. The morality of the story was specific to the time period. What would be the purpose of modernizing it yet again? We're just fighting terrorists and dictators these days, we're not out to slaughter entire cultures on a whim, nor are we in a position where we're the ones being wiped out. Besides, after films like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day, The Core, and other present-day disaster films, doing WotW in the same vein would make just another cog in a tired, rusty machine. (Besides, ID4 is too fresh in people's minds to try doing WotW as a modern-day piece. People would dismiss it as an ID4 retread and ignore it.) Setting it in the original time period, by contrast, would make it a standout movie. Three-legged tanks barbecuing 19th-century London with laser fire and poison gas? Royal dreadnaughts and ironclad ships being demolished in the blink of an eye? Turn-of-the-century European nations being destroyed and deserted, being reduced to apocalyptic wastelands? (They could easily adapt some material from Kevin Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches to show the rest of the world getting mangled by the Martian invaders.) THAT is something we've not seen before on film. And it would be something fresh and unique, something that would stand apart from all the other alien invasion flicks out there. Besides, with Peter Pan, Harry Potter, and The Lord Of The Rings all getting faithful film treatments, why should WotW be denied this?

No dice. If they're not going to do this movie as a period piece, then there's no reason to make it in the first place.

(For those of you who I would much rather be talking to, it seems I was mistaken when I said the Cruise/Spielberg project wasn't going anywhere. A quick stop at www.waroftheworldsonline.com lead to a bit in the news section about Tom Cruise scouting locations in New Zealand for the movie, with Danny DeVito rumored to be joining him as a co-producer. Cruise, Spielberg, and perhaps DeVito? This might be shaping up into something good.)