While A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 would have been helped by Robert Englund playing Freddy Krueger, the original star reprising the role would not have been enough to salvage the remake. In the late 2000s, there was an outpouring of slasher remakes that re-imagined classic '80s entries into the horror subgenre. Everything from Halloween to Friday the 13th was rebooted, which made it inevitable that Wes Craven’s legendary fantasy slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street would eventually be remade.
Sure enough, 2010 saw the release of Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, a re-imagining of the 1984 movie that was almost universally condemned by fans of the franchise and critics alike. While A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 was a faithful remake for the most part — almost too much so, according to many reviewers — the movie failed to bring back the original Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund in his most famous role. Englund turned down the part for good reason, and his justification for rejecting the reboot is proof that even Englund's beloved version of Freddy couldn't have saved the project.
Englund pointed out that most actors, himself included, prefer to do sequels over remakes (via Paste). Until 2010, even the weakest Nightmare on Elm Street sequels featured Englund’s Freddy, but the actor noted that Mel Gibson would never appear in a remake of the first Lethal Weapon playings Martin Riggs again (a point later proven true when the show’s TV remake recast the role) even though he might show up in a sequel. Englund said that he would potentially play Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street 9, but that he couldn’t bring himself to play the role in a revised version of the first A Nightmare on Elm Street movie again. It was a reasonable explanation that proves the remake was always doomed since, even if Englund reprised his role, the screen veteran would just have been repeating lines, scenes, and beats that he already performed decades earlier.
Robert Englund Was Right To Turn Down A Nightmare On Elm Street’s Remake
While losing the original Freddy made the Nightmare on Elm Street remake even harder to justify, franchise star and horror legend Robert Englund was right to avoid the reboot. Most of the critical lambasting that the 2010 remake received took aim at the movie’s failure to expand on the original 1984 movie, as the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot was significantly more redundant than most of its slasher re-do contemporaries. While Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake was extremely divisive, for instance, the 2007 release at least changed a lot from 1978’s original movie. Similarly, 2009’s Friday the 13th remake was more of a mashup of everything that made the original movies work than a straightforward remake of the 1980 original, and the movie was stronger for this fact.
In contrast, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 changed almost nothing about its story, meaning Englund was correct to note that he would simply have been repeating himself if he starred in the ill-fated outing. Devoid of an original take on the plot and characters of 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, there was no reason for the 2010 remake to exist. As such, Robert Englund's presence alone couldn't have salvaged the movie if he had reprised the part of Freddy Krueger.