Today I saw a theater production of Othello where they made the unusual decision to have Iago die in the end. It’s not the way the play was written, but the audience was clearly very happy about it.
Coincidentally, yesterday I rewatched the movie Ghost, which I had not seen since it first came out in 1990. Since I knew what was going to happen this time around, I found myself being extremely impressed with how the narrative and the character arcs were crafted. From just the perspective of story structure, Ghost is a much better film than most of what comes out of Hollywood.
But today, after watching Othello, I also realized that Ghost has many parallels with Othello. Particularly if Othello has Iago die in the end.
And I find myself wondering how many Hollywood movies borrow from Shakespeare. I’m not talking about the homages to Shakespeare, like West Side Story, or She’s the Man, or The Lion King, or 10 things I hate about you.
I mean the ones that are not explicitly doing a Shakespeare knockoff. Maybe there is a lot more Shakespeare in those movies than we think.