Austin Butler to star as Patrick Bateman in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘American Psycho’

I really like Luca Guadagnino, and I don’t think this movie will be bad. I often think remakes can be really cool—Luca’s Suspiria remake is a perfect example of what a remake should be.

The thing is, American Psycho already has a great adaptation that doesn’t need modern filmmaking techniques because it’s not that old and still holds up really well.

Suspiria takes the original’s concept and creates a more cohesive movie without disrespecting or trying to replace the original.

I just can’t see that happening with this movie.

I know it’s a book, so it’s technically an adaptation and not a remake, but everything I said still stands.

Made me think of Gus van Sant's 1998 remake of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and his remarks on it years later.

The intentions of the movie was to see what would happen if you tried to, you know, literally do the same thing. What did happen and what I learned from it was that even though your camera angles are actually the same, the performances are close, but the kind of intentions of the filmmaker and the soul of the filmmaker is different. My 'Psycho' became devoid of, like, some of the most important things that were in the original. Which were these sort of dark underlying tensions. You know in mine, it's... the dark underlying tensions are kind of, like, not there. There's something else there that doesn't really fit with what 'Psycho' is. So it kind of became a, er... you know, an example of how you can't really copy something. I think that it's just the way that I've been, you know, creating and relating to film...structurally, as um, being a language all its own and being...basically the language itself being what the film is about, you know - what films are generally about. They can have subjects, but in the end it's the language that's the true subject.

• Gus van Sant
  The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2044056/

The original movie didn't manage to live up to the book, but I struggle to see how any movie really could.

They definitely toned down the violence in the movie, but even then got an R rating in the USA.

The book has suffocating detail about 80's consumerism, as a critique.

The book also leaves you wondering if the murders and executions were simply an hallucinatory allegory for 80's wall streets corporate takeover greed.

There is so much inner monologue in the book, the movie can't help but be a shallow imitation.

You know what, I’ll give it a chance.

I thought Luca Guadagnino was crazy when they announced a Suspiria remake but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t wholly different from the original and great. I hope that this has the same result. A different enough movie to justify it’s existence that explores the same themes and ideas as the original American Psycho film could be great.

At the very worst, it’ll be a visual feast.

For what it's worth, I just hope Austin shaves for it. Could they have picked a worse picture to put next to Bateman?