Gone with the Wind
Why It Doesn’t Need a Prequel: Both on the page and on the screen, the narrative arc of this epic Civil War-era romance relies on using the fall of the South to depict the gradual rise of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara’s self-reliance. A pre-Civil War prequel would just be a celebration of really old-fashioned Southern values, one that would make Django Unchained look practically PC. (Besides, we’ve already seen what happened when they tried to sequelize GTTW and no one wants to go through that again.)
But If They Made One, Here’s How to Do It: Shift the focus from the O’Hara clan to Mammy (played by Quvenzhané Wallis as a child and Octavia Spencer as an adult), recounting the tale of how she came to be forcibly employed at Tara and the challenges she experienced as she “diapered three generations of this family’s girls” including, eventually, little Scarlett herself. This would give audiences the chance to experience the shameful history of the American slave trade through one character’s eyes and flesh out a role that’s largely a walking stereotype in the original movie. (Novelist Alice Randall attempted something similar with her controversial — and unofficial — prequel, The Wind Done Gone, although that book ran concurrently with GTTW and was told from the perspective of another Mammy’s illegitimate mulatto daughter.)
Read more: Oz the Great and Powerful: How to Prequelize Other Classic Films
