Movie remakes have a terrible reputation and are often seen as cash grabs, capitalizing on nostalgia that doesn’t require much creativity to bring to the screen. There are exceptions to that rule, like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which reinvented the films they were remaking.
The live-action Disney remake films are generally called out by many as entirely unnecessary, but one of them sticks out as the most unnecessary and the worst: The Lion King (2019).
Like the current trend of live-action Disney remakes, there’s been a significant trend since the 2000s of English language remakes of successful foreign horror films.
The shot-for-shot remake is more common than we might expect, but one of the first widely seen examples is the 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho.
It’s another remake that shows filmmaking is so much more than the story, as the original’s sense of personality (courtesy of writer/director Eli Roth) is lacking from the remake.
It’s a bold choice to remake a Cold War era classic in the 2010s when movies are marketed to Chinese audiences just as much as Americans, but that’s what Red Dawn (2012) attempted to do anyway.
Paul Verhoeven’s original Robocop is one of the greatest movies ever made about the relationship between police and capital. The remake is a serviceable action movie with overwrought drama.
The movie waters down the violence of the original and makes the ridiculous story more serious, thereby losing the sense of silliness and fun that were central to the original.