Goodbye superhero movies, hello again westerns: Clint Eastwood classic A Fistful of Dollars is getting a remake

The original spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars is apparently getting a remake, and originality is dead.

There's been all sorts of trends in Hollywood since films started being big events rather than just experiments in what's possible with the medium. These days it's superhero films, though they might be on the way out. The '60s saw the arrival of the spaghetti western, a genre of film that gets its namesake for the fact that they were westerns produced in Europe, the spaghetti part coming from the fact a lot of them were made by Italian directors and producers. It was A Fistful of Dollars that kicked off the subgenre in 1964, an iconic film directed by Sergio Leone with the (now) curmudgeonly Clint Eastwood in the lead role. Despite a couple of attempts here and there, a remake has never materialised, but as reported by Deadline, it appears one is now in the works.

Euro Gang Entertainment, a company founded by Gianni Nunnari (300_ and SImon Horsman (Magazine Dreams) is set to produce it alongside Enzo Sisti (Ripley) of FPC, as well as the Rome-based Jolly Film, the studio behind the original film. Details are reportedly under wraps for now, as it's still quite early in development, but the general assumption is that it will be an English-language film - a writer hasn't been revealed as of yet, nor has a cast or filming date.

A Fistful of Dollars follows a wandering gunman as he finds himself in a new town, where he plays two sides of opposing factions against one another. It went on to spawn two equally successful films, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. While A Fistful of Dollars itself has never received a remake, it technically is one.

The film was later identified as an unlicensed remake of the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo, leading production company Toho to file a lawsuit. That lawsuit ended up being successful, resulting in Kurosawa and Toho receiving 15% of the film's revenue, so it'll be interesting to see how this is navigated with the spaghetti western's remake.