News arrived Thursday that Robert Downey Jr. and Paramount have acquired the rights to do a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. And the Twitterverse et al have had plenty to say about Hollywood lacking imagination and taste.

Many local film buffs will fight you if you question the idea that the best film ever shot in San Francisco is Vertigo. And it seems likely that if this remake starring Robert Downey Jr. in the James Stewart roll ends up getting made soon, it will be shot, at least partly, in San Francisco — so that could at least be a brief win for the local economy.

Will it, though? Ant-Man took place here but that and its sequel didn't rack up much actual location shooting — Ant-Man & The Wasp apparently shot here for two days in secret, for instance.

The Chronicle's G. Allen Johnson is making a public plea to Downey today that a new Vertigo ought to be shot here and not, like many Marvel films that Downey is a part of, mostly shot on a soundstage in Atlanta "against a green screen, with a digital San Francisco added later."

With all his Marvel money, Downey can well afford to shoot in SF, which is a notably expensive place to shoot things. So hopefully he will.

Johnson also votes for Margot Robbie to play the Kim Novak role. Maybe they can bring back Novak herself, who is 90, for a cameo of some kind.

And, for the many people lamenting this remake on social media, Johnson and others point out that Vertigo has been remade multiple times — remade in spirit a couple of times by Brian DePalma, in Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984), by Paul Verhoeven in Basic Instinct (1991), and in South Korea's Decision to Leave (2022), for instance.

Anyway, the laments and comments: