Gender-swapped and race-flipped remakes aren't living up to their potential
In the new comedy What Men Want, Taraji P. Henson plays a high-stakes sports agent who, after a slapstick-y mishap, gains the power to hear the inner thoughts of the men (and only the men) in her immediate vicinity. She immediately decides to use her power to get ahead at work. The premise and title may sound familiar: What Men Want is a remake of What Women Want, Nancy Meyers’ 2000 comedy starring Mel Gibson. This isn’t the first recent story to riff on a previous project by swapping protagonists’ genders or races — 2018’s in-continuity franchise installment Ocean’s 8 and the 2016 separate-continuity reboot Ghostbusters are two high-profile examples — but the practice goes back at least as far as 1940’s gender-swapped cinematic take on...