Steven Soderbergh recently gave the "State of Cinema" keynote speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival.  You can read the full transcript here, in which he speaks at length about making unique films and dealing with studio bureaucracy.

This paragraph in particular stuck out for me:

<blockquote rel="soderbergh"><b>Steven Soderbergh wrote:</b><br>Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of waste. I think there are too many layers of executives, I don’t know why you should be having a lot of phone calls with people that can’t actually make decisions. They’ll violate their own rules on a whim, while they make you adhere to them. They get simple things wrong sometimes, like remakes. I mean, why are you always remaking the famous movies? Why aren’t you looking back into your catalog and finding some sort of programmer that was made 50 years ago that has a really good idea in it, that if you put some fresh talent on it, it could be really great. Of course, in order to do that you need to have someone at the studio that actually knows those movies. Even if you don’t have that person you could hire one. The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it’s a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it’s the third-biggest export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes.</blockquote>

The whole thing is pretty interesting like that.  But the question I want to put to my fellow retro-dazers is: 

What old, lesser-known properties would you like to see remade or rebooted as a movie? 

Hollywood's got reboot fever.  What should they do instead of starting Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman all over again after only ten years?  John Carter should have been a perfect example.  A character universe unknown in recent decades, that was created by a famous adventure writer who also created one of the most enduring characters of all time.  How do you screw that up?  Another point Soderbergh makes: executives in control who don't actually like or care about movies.

What else is out there that could use some new life, and hopefully not get screwed up?

Some of my choices would be -

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (I recently listened to an audio drama that used this as the basis and it actually played out nicely as a drama, with some liberties taken in order to make it work)

Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver series of games

DigiChars: Dawning (I kidd. Or... do I???)

Speaking of Spider-Man reboots... this.

Funny that he used Mr. T. as inspiration. I can just now picture the scene where Electro gives Peter his rundown of all the things he should or should not do... "don't do drugs, stay in school, drink milk, take your vitamins, hug your aunt May..."