Simon Pegg Says He’ll Be ‘Incensed’ If ‘Shaun of the Dead’ Gets Remade: ‘So Disrespectful to the Original’ – PEOPLE

Twenty years after Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg is explaining why he and director Edgar Wright would not be on board with a remake or reboot.

“I mean, Universal [Pictures] owns it. If they choose to reboot it then they can if they want, I guess. Although Edgar and I would be incensed,” the actor, 54, told The Hollywood Reporter, while he spoke about the film’s legacy and his current role on The Boys.

“Shaun of the Dead is incredibly personal. There’s so much of us in that film,” he added.

“The whole thing with Shaun’s mum, the stepdad, I had a problematic relationship with my stepfather. It was Edgar’s idea to kill the mum,” Pegg said. “I couldn’t believe it when he said that, but it was the best decision. There’s so much of our own heart and soul in that film. If someone was to reboot it, it would be a cynical and exploitative exercise. I would hope that people are in love with our Shaun enough to resist a reboot.”

Shaun of the Dead, a comedic take on a zombie apocalypse breaking out in London, marked the first of three movies Pegg and Wright made together, which they refer to as the Three Flavours Cornetto films, including 2007’s Hot Fuzz and 2013’s The World’s End.

While speaking with THR, Pegg noted that his character in The World’s End incorporated “a lot about my own alcoholism” and shared that he does not like when reboots completely reuse an older movie’s title.

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“The thought of anyone just nicking the title … I always got annoyed at Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake — it’s a great movie. It’s really exciting. But I hated the fact they called it Dawn of the Dead, because that was George [Romero]’s film,” he added.

“They could have called it Deadish, which was a great line in the film that one of the actors used, and it still would have been a great film. But when you just take a title because people recognize it, it’s so disrespectful to the original.”

Pegg also noted that he does not see how a sequel to Shaun of the Dead would work either.

“If you were to see Shaun again, if the zombies came back, there’s just not a story to tell it. We’d have to reset everything that we created in Shaun of the Dead, the journey that Shaun goes on and completes,” he told the outlet. “He becomes a new person, but we’d have to then dismantle that in order to give him a new arc. Why?”

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