Hollywood Needs To Stop Remaking Shia LaBeouf

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There’s been a lot of outrage over the last decade over Hollywood’s insistence on resurrecting classic American films like Robocop and The Karate Kid. While it is true that such remakes are a disgrace and an insult to the original masterpieces and their respective auteurs, a movie being remade isn’t the end of the world. Some folks even go as far to say that these remakes are ruining their childhoods.

Not for nothing, but if a remake of an action movie from 30 years ago is all it takes to ruin your childhood, you should count your blessings. Some people were molested. Besides, complaining about Robocop is just a distraction from a much bigger issue in Hollywood–the remaking of Shia LaBeouf.

You see, it’s pretty well known in the entertainment industry that Shia LeBeouf has been killed and reanimated several times over the past fifteen years. The Shia we have now is so far away from anything that could be considered original, that he is essentially fraud incarnate. He’s a copy of a copy of a copy, and anyone who has seen and owns Multiplicity on VHS (me) knows that once you clone a clone, the results are disastrous.

It all started back in 2001, when the original Shia was diagnosed with AIDS after servicing the entire lighting crew on the set of Even Stevens. At the time, Disney had a strict policy of collecting and cryogenically preserving DNA samples of all of its child stars in the event that they needed to be cloned, and that’s exactly what happened. They spawned and incubated a new Shia, and replaced him overnight, leaving the original to die quietly in the storage room atop Mount Matterhorn. It was seamless, and no one was the wiser.

Problems began later however, when the replacement Shia was killed during the filming of Holes after being repeatedly stung by scorpions that had been attracted by the scent of lighting crew semen. Disney had lost the original DNA, and opted to use the clone’s DNA to create Shia3: Return of Shia. Shia3’s behavior became slightly erratic, but this was written off as the effects of puberty on the young Shia’s synthetic ovaries.

Problems continued, and Shia after Shia were killed in a series of bizarre accidents. His scrotum was caught in an escalator during the filming of Eagle Eye, his intestines were sucked out of his anus by the vent on the bottom of a pool while shooting Crystal Skull, and on the set of Transformers, one of the props came crashing down just inches from his head. Shia was fine that time, but of course there were always the lighting crews.

Considering that we’re about seven Shias deep at this point, it’s somewhat of a surprise to me that anyone is shocked by his recent plagiarism. In fact, it would be disingenuous if the Neoshias were to do anything but steal ideas and words from other people. Is it really a loss of artistic integrity if there was no authenticity in the first place? Shia wasn’t born – he was made. Just like all the other engineered child icons, his press kit predates his birth certificate and his personality was sculpted around products that he was born to sell. Why would you expect an original idea from someone who has never had an original experience? Let the man steal–he’ll find his way to the lighting department soon enough.

The real culprit here is the Hollywood machine that insists on recreating these poor young men and women and Shias. Do we really need to clone celebrities to create the same shitty product over and over again? In a culture where unoriginality is pandemic and we subsist off the repeated sharing of other people’s ideas, is it so much to ask that we simply embrace the death of celebrities, reflect, and let newness be defined on its own terms? Besides, who needs clones anyways when we have CGI Paul Walker and Tupac holograms. Stop cloning Shia LeBeouf, and bring back Cherry 2000, that movie ruled and everyone on my Facebook needs to know how excited and angry I am about the reboot.