First off, it was doomed to failure from the start. Training Day wasn't a good movie, it didn't have a good plot, it didn't have a good story. What it had was Denzel Washington giving one of the best performances in recent memory. He did an epic job, and it's that work that made people like the movie.
People didn't watch Training Day because it was good, they watched it because Denzel was great. And Training Day without Denzel... sucks. No one is going to be interested in it, because it was a "meh" at best, with a performance from ONE man that people still talk about.
Give it another 20 years, people will probably still be talking about Denzel's performance in Training Day.
Let's be honest, they don't watch it for Ethan Hawke. People don't even watch it because they like the movie, they watch it because they loved Denzel's role in the movie.
But it was also 2017, and they had to race swap the bad guy, which people were already starting to roll their eyes at back then. It's also a big red flag. Washington was LEGENDARY in the movie, and that couldn't be made today because he's... Black. There, I said it.
Denzel Washington is Black and because of his race, we could possibly be deprived of another legendary performance because villainy in Hollywood is exclusively reserved for white men. Let that sink in for a moment.
The best role of 2001, a role that Denzel nailed, a role that he will go down in history for... and it can't be made today because Denzel is Black. Maybe they would cast him in Hawke's place, but that wouldn't give him the ability to pack the punch he had in the film. That role just wasn't as good, he couldn't take it away like he did.
So, 2017 comes around, they race swap the character and they attempt to make the film into a TV series without the one thing that people care about, the one thing that people liked about the movie... Denzel Washington.
