Decades before Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 used the concept of aliens coming to our planet as a none-too-subtle metaphor for the hardships of the immigrant experience, the difficulties of assimilation, and the ugliness of racism, 1988’s Alien Nation engaged in a similar exercise. The film casts James Caan as a racist, alien-phobic cop who must team up with a space-alien detective, played by Mandy Patinkin, to solve a crime. In that respect, the film fit snugly into the 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon-fueled mismatched-buddy-cop movie template—flicks about wildly dissimilar crime-stoppers who learn to put aside their differences in personality, race, and home planet to crack the big case. 

The film was a modest critical and commercial success, and later spawned a solid television adaptation I remember watching a lot as a kid. It was a good premise whose promise neither the film nor the television adaptation (which spawned its own television movies, novels, and comic books) realized completely. 

Now, it looks like show-business is getting an increasingly less-rare third attempt to make a promising premise succeed: The film is being remade by Fox from a script by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, the writers of the wildly successful Iron Man adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. There is no word on casting yet, but the studio will have its hands full finding contemporary actors able to channel the crankiness of a past-his-prime James Caan and the eternallly smooth Mandy Patinkin, who is probably too busy with his motivational/self-help podcast that I just made up called Quit Yer Stinking Thinking With Mandy Patinkin to favor this remake with so much as a cameo. 

Though it’s easy to be cynical about remakes, Alien Nation is the movie that theoretically should get remade: An uneven but sometimes inspired film with a great, if under-realized, premise, rather than an acknowledged classic that can only suffer by comparison to the original. The Hollywood Reporter says the studio sees its critically and commercially successful reboot of the Planet Of The Apes movies as a model for the remake. But lest anyone get too excited, the article points out that the screenwriters worked on that dreadful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot as well as a re-imagining of the Highlander. It seems like as far as films in a franchise go, Marcum and Holloway are firm believers that there can be more than just one, especially if the box office is booming.