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Fall must be around the corner, because Hollywood has already turned the clocks back. After a summer of sequels that did little to further franchises or business, the film industry is doing the time warp again. Over the next eight weeks that constitute Hollywood's truncated fall (executives will peddle holiday fare in early November), we'll see no fewer than three remakes, a prequel and a re-release. Studios are hoping that classic titles -- one dating back a century -- will jump-start theaters from the box-office doldrums. The Lion King 3D Footloose

Opens Sept. 16

Stars: Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Nathan Lane

Directors: Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff

Opens Oct. 14

Stars: Kenny Wormald, Dennis Quaid, Julianne Hough

Director: Craig Brewer

Then: This cat seemed to come out of nowhere.

Then: Dancing stars were all the rage in 1984. On the heels of Fame in 1980 and Flashdance in 1983, this story of a religious town that bans dancing featured a rebellious Kevin Bacon with happy feet, Lori Singer with pouty lips and John Lithgow with a Bible he thumped to prove a point.

"It's hard to believe, but we were nervous" before the 1994 Disney animated musical about a lion framed for murder hit the big screens, says producer Don Hahn. "We described it as Moses meets Hamlet in South Africa with a soundtrack by Elton John. We weren't sure anyone would want to see it."

Critics couldn't get their groove on to the movie, featuring Kenny Loggins' hit single of the same name. Footloose, Roger Ebert wrote, "is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does them all badly."

He needn't have worried. The film would go on to gross $313 million domestically, become the third-biggest G-rated film and spawn a stage musical that has been running since 1999.

Moviegoers, however, caught dance fever and propelled the movie to $80 million, making it the seventh-biggest movie of the year.

Now: It worked in 2-D, so why not 3-D? King remains the highest-grossing 2-D animated film, amassing $783 million worldwide. And Hahn believes there is a new audience unfamiliar with the story.

Now: There is no purer remake than this. While Brewer updated some of the script's terminology, the screenplay is essentially the same one Dean Pitchford wrote decades ago.

"Walt Disney used to do that all the time before video, re-release a movie in theaters every seven years so a new generation can discover it," he says. "That's what we're trying to do here. People haven't seen Lion King on the big screen in 15 years."

Brewer says he had no hesitation in remaking the musical -- as long as it hewed to the first story. "When Paramount asked me to remake Footloose, I said, 'Is it OK if I actually remake Footloose, with the original script?' I didn't want to make something entirely different, just with the same name and some dancing kids."

Hahn says artists took months adding depth and texture to the hand-drawn film, while Allers and Minkoff returned to oversee the conversion. "What was important was to have the original filmmakers involved," he says. "It felt like a continuation of what we created in 1994."

Brewer did make one significant change to the script: He moved a key scene that explains the ban on dancing. It comes at the end of the first film and moves near the beginning of the remake.

That continuation includes some jaw-dropping effects, Hahn says, particularly the opening scene set to the song Circle of Life. "There's such a visceral, emotional reaction," Hahn says. "It's spectacular in 3-D. It had been out of circulation for a long time; we thought it would be a great back-to-school movie."

"The biggest thing I wanted to do was not demonize the parents so much," he says. "There's a big difference from when I saw the movie when I was 13 and now, because I'm a parent. I wanted to make it a more understandable conflict."

Straw Dogs

Opens Sept. 16

Stars: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard

Director: Rod Lurie

Then: Dustin Hoffman never made a movie before or after that was like this 1971 thriller about a mousey mathematician pushed to the depths of violence after his English cottage is invaded by locals.

Directed by Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch), Dogs was controversial immediately after hitting cinemas. Particularly outrageous were two rape scenes in which the victim, played by Susan George, seemed to sympathize with her attackers. That and the bloody 20-minute finale led many critics to assail the movie as glorifying violence and the subjugation of women. Peckinpah denied the claims, but Dogs would become emblematic of the savage-street stories of the early '70s. Film critic Pauline Kael called Dogs "the first American film that is a fascist work of art."

Now: Lurie says he was hesitant about the remake until he saw Dustin Hoffman a few years back at a Golden Globes party.

"I told him I had the rights to Straw Dogs, but I was nervous about a remake," Lurie says. "Dustin put both hands on my shoulders and said, 'It's a scary Western. That's all it is.' That took some of the pressure off."

Lurie moves the setting from rural England to the Deep South and says that his film's rape scene "is not going to draw the ire of feminists.

"The more I read about Peckinpah's movie, the more I realized his film suggests human beings are genetically coded to violence, that man becomes an animal in the end. I just don't believe that. I think it's more conditioned than a natural part of you. We take a different philosophical approach."

The Thing

Opens Oct. 14

Stars: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Then: The 1982 film set the bar for gross-outs. This story about a parasitic alien life form that takes the shape of its victims featured Kurt Russell as an Antarctic researcher trying to kill the creature while saving his hide. Critics and fans initially shrugged their shoulders at the John Carpenter film.

"In sacrificing everything at the altar of gore, Carpenter sabotages the drama," Newsweek's David Ansen griped. "The Thing is so single-mindedly determined to keep you awake that it almost puts you to sleep." Moviegoers yawned, too. The $15 million movie spooked up just $14 million domestically.

However, viewers gave the picture a second look on home video, and it became a cult hit. The movie would spark a novelization, Universal theme-park attraction, Dark Horse comic series, video game and action figures based on the monster.

Now: The original left a tantalizing question: Who were those Norwegian researchers at the movie's opening, and why were they shooting at a dog from a helicopter? The new version, explains Heijningen, is less a remake than a prequel, telling the story of those Norwegians who first came across The Thing.

"I know it sounds like a remake," says Heijningen, making his feature-film debut. "But there's not much you can do with The Thing. We couldn't call it The Rise of the Thing or The Thing in the Beginning. That's too corny and doesn't stay true to the ferocity of the monster."

Heijningen considers his film a companion piece to Carpenter's. "You could watch these back-to-back. It would play like one four-hour movie."

The Three Musketeers

Opens Oct. 21

Stars: Logan Lerman, Christoph Waltz, Matthew Macfadyen, Milla Jovovich

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Then: It was one of cinema's original bromances. We've been chanting "All for one and one for all" since Thomas Edison's film production company put the Musketeers on the big (but silent) screen in 1911. Since then, there have been no fewer than a dozen American and international remakes of the swordsmen born of the Alexandre Dumas novel.

Big names have starred in the French adventure, from Gene Kelly in 1948 to Oliver Reed in 1973 to Charlie Sheen 20 years later. But the only film that came close to being seen en masse was the 1993 Disney version starring Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris O'Donnell. The movie mustered $54 million -- not bad back then -- but it also came with a then-hefty price tag of $30 million.

And critics had a field day.

"For a moment," Entertainment Weekly quipped about one of the swashbucklers, "the poor boy looks like he wouldn't even know where to find his own sword."

Now: If Sherlock Holmes can be updated, why not D'Artagnan and his blade brothers? Anderson says he was a huge fan of the 1973 film by Richard Lester, but there wasn't a relevant swashbuckler story for today's kids.

"Every generation should get its own Three Musketeers," he says. "'All for one, one for all' is a timeless message."

The 2009 version of Sherlock Holmes, by Guy Ritchie, "was genius. It showed what you can do when you tell a story with a modern sheen but with timeless themes." At the heart of Musketeers, Anderson says, is a narrative whose "core values are exciting: romance, friendship, loyalty. Those themes never go out of style."

(c) Copyright 2011 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.   

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