Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Remakes Better Than the Originals

Following on from Monday's post here are movie remakes that are better than the originals. I'm not counting remakes into a different language, that would be far too many films. I'm also not counting made-for-TV versions.

I probably shouldn't count remakes of a silent film into a talkie, that strikes me as huge shift in the medium, but I'm leaving them in and have marked the four affected films.

  • 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man - from silent
  • 1938 Wizard of Oz - from silent
  • 1940 His Girl Friday
  • 1941 The Maltese Falcon
  • 1954 A Star Is Born
  • 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much
  • 1956 The Ten Commandments - from silent
  • 1957 An Affair to Remember
  • 1959 Ben-Hur - from silent
  • 1968 Romeo and Juliet
  • 1982 The Thing
  • 1986 The Fly
  • 1986 Little Shop of Horrors
  • 1988 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
  • 1995 Heat
  • 1999 The Thomas Crown Affair
  • 2001 Ocean's Eleven
  • 2002 The Quiet American
  • 2005 Batman Begins
  • 2007 3:10 to Yuma
  • 2012 Dredd

I'm not sure any of these belong here, but I've seen them argued on several lists.

  • 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre
  • 1983 Scarface
  • 1991 Cape Fear
  • 1996 Ransom
  • 2000 Gone in Sixty Seconds
  • 2003 Freaky Friday
  • 2003 The Italian Job
  • 2004 Dawn of the Dead
  • 2007 I Am Legend
  • 2010 True Grit

Okay, what am I missing or wrong about?

1 comment:

Ryan said...

Interesting. I feel like you should discount some of the remakes of silent films like Tarzan and Wizard of Oz because they owe more to their original classic source novels than to the silent films that came before them. If you are including these two films, then I would argue you would have to include films like Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein and one of the many Sherlock Holmes films because they had primitive predecessors during the silent era. The Ten Commandments might be a different case because I think the 1956 plotline owes more to the silent era film. Not sure about Ben Hur, but I do know there was an original source novel.