Word is spreading like wildfire that Robert Zemeckis is remaking Yellow Submarine in motion-captured 3D. Pitchforks are being sharpened and the torches are being lit all over Twitter and message boards. I have a feeling die-hard Beatles fans and cinephiles will be up in arms about this until they see that glorious first reel. Does anything ever truly need a remake or "reimagining"? In this case and others, it's the only way to ensure their preservation.
Show me a studio other than Disney willing to clean up and restore catalog animated films and I'll eat my hat. Anyone think we'll see Rankin/Bass animated features like Flight of Dragons restored? A pile of them aren't even on DVD! Lionsgate can't be bothered to have anyone clean up The Last Unicorn better than the German master they found for the most recent DVD. I could go on and on.
The buzz of a new release related to The Yellow Submarine License means that we would likely see the original film properly remastered for HD. Even if the Zemeckis mo-cap version is terrible and/or bombs horribly (neither of which I'm hoping for), the revival of the brand happens regardless. The restoration cost could be rolled into the always-hidden advertising budget as tie-in marketing, and thus guarantee that a Blu-ray of the original will happen with complete certainty.
This is the same reason I'm thrilled to hear they're re-adapting Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, a story that made me ecologically conscious at an early age. Ditto for Where the Wild Things Are. They'll clean up the originals and at the very least put them on DVD. If I hate the new ones, the originals will be there to continue being passed on, as will the books they're based on.
I'm not a remake cheerleader (never have been), but some of them actually work. You'd have to be terribly naive or uninformed to believe that a studio would sink the significant cost of restoration into something that won't pay them back double. This is a good thing for people who like the first Yellow Submarine movie, period, end of story.