Why Remake "Amadeus?"

Especially if you don't grasp what the original was really about.

There’s a new 5-hour remake of Amadeus on Starz by screenwriter Joe Barton. (I haven’t seen it.) From the New York Times:

‘Amadeus’ Review: Mozart vs. Salieri, Round 3

The story of genius and jealousy, a major award winner onstage and on film, returns as a TV series starring Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany.

By Mike Hale

May 8, 2026, 5:04 a.m. ET

… “Amadeus,” an 18th-century costume drama that tells a fanciful story about real people — the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Will Sharpe) and Antonio Salieri (Paul Bettany), rivals at the court of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna — is a long ways from the yakuza. But it’s a genre piece, too: a fairly conventional artist’s biography, tricked up with ideas about the nature of genius that make it seem more substantial than it is.

Shaffer, a crafty dramatist with a strong sense of what would please an audience, skirted the challenge of humanizing the godlike Mozart or trying to understand his genius. He instead focused on the jealous, pitiably human Salieri, who recognizes the younger composer’s greatness but can’t comprehend it — much like the rest of us. When Salieri curses God and embarks on a campaign to sabotage Mozart’s career — to kill him, symbolically or perhaps for real — he’s someone we can both abhor and identify with.

Barton is taking on this material in a time with more complicated demands for historical dramas, and at greater length: five episodes totaling about four and a half hours. Some choices are immediately apparent, such as a commitment to colorblind casting

Mozart is played by Will Sharpe, who is half Japanese. He previously played “Buddy Yamaguchi” in the Amadeus remake writer-director Joe Barton’s Hari-Giri. On the other hand, he’s not that Asian looking, more like Keanu Reeves.

But some of the other casting is totally-take-you-out-of-your-willing-suspension-of-disbelief DEI nonsense:

Franz Süssmayr completed Mozart’s Requiem.

and an effort to increase the number and the importance of the female roles.

Peter Shaffer was gay and wasn’t much interested in Mr. and Mrs. Mozart’s romance and happy marriage.

And while the costumes and the production design are period, the tone is modern, in the comic-anachronistic style of “The Serpent Queen” or “The Great,” with references to self sabotage, relatability and cost effectiveness.

On a larger scale, Barton sticks to the main points of Shaffer’s plot while rearranging many of the details and adding new elements of political and sexual intrigue. He appears to stay slightly closer to the actual sequence of historical events, and he tries for a more grounded, more psychologically nuanced approach, with less of an emphasis on melodrama and visual spectacle than Forman brought to the film.

The new version tries to be more historically accurate, more grounded, more psychologically nuanced … just with much more ridiculous casting. How’s that going to work out?

And, what’s the point of remaking the 1984 film Amadeus, one of the most delightful pieces of high class showbiz razz-ma-tazz ever? What are the odds that you are going to improve on a movie in which everything happened to work near perfectly? Why not take on a subject for which we don’t yet have a wholly successful version? For instance, nobody has quite yet made a canonical Beethoven video.

Especially, why remake Amadeus when it doesn’t appear the new guy understands what Peter Shaffer’s play is really about.

Paywall here.