Originals or Remakes?

[Antemortem]

When a movie is first released, whether it be locally or internationally, it garners a certain amount of success, be it a high grossing opening weekend or even a consistent weekly gross for a certain amount of time. Of course, a movie's success, if any, tends to deteriorate over a period of time, and sometimes people will think 'wow, that movie was such a success fifty years ago that we should remake it!'

This is a solid idea; remake a successful movie with even better actors, better cinematic displays and effects, and a few plot twists here and there. Media gold. Sometimes, however, said movie will bomb entirely and will have proved to be an ill-fated attempt at rehashing a dead franchise. The producers of the movie proceed to lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.

What are your feelings on remakes? Are they typically better than the originals, or have you seen your fair share of bombs? Perhaps it's hit-or-miss with you?

[Pinkie-Dawn]

Remakes tend to be a hit-or-miss. We get some really good ones such John Carpenter's The Thing and Peter Jackson's King Kong, but most of the time they get panned by critics such as Clash of the Titans and The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Horror genre seems to suffer the most from this issue, leading people to believe that the genre is dying, which means Hollywood is dying as well, thus caused the demand for more pure original blockbuster movies and the abandonment of book/comic/TV show/game/play adaptions and remakes/sequels/reboots.

[Scarf]

Remakes are best when they're done of bad old movies. Ocean's Eleven is a great example. The original was crap, but the remake was great, though the sequels to the remake are a mixed bag.

I don't really like to see someone remaking a film who's trying to making it darker, edgier, sexier, faster, etc. It seems like lots of remakes are only attempting to update special effects, social norms, and cash in on a younger audience, who'll see the movie because it's got actors they know, while trying to rope in people who liked the original. And when you try to be all things to all people you're probably going to fail which is why it's better to remake something already bad to give yourself a better chance.

[Toshiro.]

It really depends on the movies. Some remakes are fantastic while others are just horrid and should not even have been attempted. Some remakes I found enjoyable were The Posieden Adventure, which was a remake of Posieden, and When A Stranger Calls, which was a 2006 remake of a film under the same name from 1976.

[stiles]

I find that remakes are almost never as good as the original. I think it's because most of the things I see being remade are from when I was a kid and being a kid just makes most things ten times better.

[AlexOzzyCake]

Like Pinkie-Dawn said, remakes usually bring to mind the phrase "hit or miss". They're usually either exceptional and make the previous movie look like a case of "what were they thinking?", or they make the old movie look like gold and the new director look like an idiot; very rarely have I seen a remake which was just as good as the original and not better. I think the best remake that I've seen was Ocean's Eleven since every aspect of that movie got so much better with great new stars and cinematics. I just wish they'd remake some more old classics since it's always really interesting to see a new director's take on an old work.

[Stunna]

Sometimes they are necessary or a good idea. Most of the time, they're not.

[Sweets Witch]

I like remakes. Some effort is put into them in order to try to reboot a title. It's not like a book-to-movie transition that can be done horrendously and in the end it'll still sell some books on top of whatever measly crap it earned in the box office (Cirque du Freak is my biggest pet peeve in that regard).

Still, I guess there are some really bad remakes out there. Most of them are horror movies because they're often just made gorier which isn't that big of a deal.

[gimmepie]

I tend to prefer originals (especially in horror) but there have been a few good remakes such as with 12 Angry Men for example and I'm looking forward to the remake of Carrie coming out this year. Don't get me started on The Nightmare on Elm Street remake though, WHY?!?! Is all I want to know.

[Harlequin]

Originally Posted by Toshiro.

It really depends on the movies. Some remakes are fantastic while others are just horrid and should not even have been attempted. Some remakes I found enjoyable were The Posieden Adventure, which was a remake of Posieden, and When A Stranger Calls, which was a 2006 remake of a film under the same name from 1976.

POSIEDEN?
POSIEDEN?
YOU DARE TO INCORRECTLY SAY THE NAME OF POSEIDON, LORD OF THE OCEANS?


Echoing Scarf's sentiments on Oceans, I felt that the remake is vastly superior to the original. Vastly superior! Fantastic! The original was....terrible, to say the least. Clooney and the gang made a terrific movie and blew the original out of the water, easily.
It stands as an example as to how remakes should be done - don't mess around too much with the original premise, but change enough of it so it has a new lease of life. Then, have a cast which actually suits the premise of the film, not just floods upon floods of A listers who really don't have a feel for their character. Actually try to make the movie stand out for it's own merits, not just as a sub-par remake of a movie which should have been left alone in the first place, either for it being crap or for it being just too good to remake in modern times.

[Mr Cat Dog]

It honestly depends on the people involved in the remake as to how good it'll be. If it's a blatant cash-grab to update a cool concept from either a foreign language film or an older film, it's probably not going to be all that great. Unfortunately, most remakes tend to fall into this camp, as studios believe that the inherent 'brand recognition' in older films will give them a leg-up at the box-office. People will go to something that they have at least some familiarity with, on the whole.

The good ones - which are, admittedly, few and far between - are the passion projects where people genuinely wish to improve an older/foreign film, or place a new spin on it for a new generation. Off the top of my head, one of the best remakes was The Departed (remaking and condensing the Hong Kong Infernal Affairs trilogy). By condensing it down - and having Martin Scorsese as the director! - it removed a lot of the fat from the original series and became much leaner as a result. Another favourite remake is His Girl Friday (remaking the film The Front Page), which changed one of the main characters from a man to woman making everything have this new sexual chemistry that was absent before. I'd highly recommend both to people sceptical about any remakes that can be good.

[Holofoil]

Some remakes I have seen have been better than the original, but a lot have been worse too.
I still like remakes though, provided they stick to the storyline and tell it better.

[Supervegeta]

Some have bombed completely (in my opinion), but not all have turned out bad. In fact, sometimes I end up liking the remake better than the original.

IMO, movies in which the remake bombed, or at least wasn't as good as the original: Bad News Bears, King Kong, 12 Angry Men, Miracle on 24th Street, Nightmare on Elm Street come to mind, the Amazing Spiderman.

IMO, movies where the remake was as good as or surpassed the original: 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit, The Dark Knight, Karate Kid.

So sometimes remakes really work. Sometimes they don't. I think the film world may just be running out of ideas. xD

[lollygag]

Remakes are, for the most part, an AWFUL idea.

Some of them:

1. 12 Angry Men. I don't have any idea why they really felt the need to make Juror #10 a member of the Nation of Islam. I know black people can be racist too, but come on, that defeats the whole purpose. The accused kid was supposed to be black!
2. The Karate Kid. It was just a half-assed attempt to get Will Smith's son to star in a movie. Jaden Smith's character learns kung-fu (that's right, NOT karate) in a few days and does it perfectly. His character seemed like a jerk, unlike Daniel in the original. The kids were too young to be fighting over a girl like that. The original had hormonal teenagers, while the remake had prepubescent kids. I admit they do make a more menacing bully - now he's a genuinely evil bully instead of a severely misguided bully. But they made the evil sensei less menacing. Kreese was a guy to be feared - even Johnny was afraid of him. Not to mention the love interest is even more shallow than Ali in the original. Ali could call out Johnny's behavior, but Meiying was like a punching bag. And where was the iconic "sweep the leg" line? (I've written fanfiction for the original. It's mostly centered around Johnny.)
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I don't know if this one counts since it was based on a book, but I'll put it here anyway. On the plus side, it did get a lot of stuff right that the first one didn't (such as using squirrels and only having songs where they belong instead of all the time), but what really puts it on the list was the Freudian backstory that they gave Willy Wonka. Do you really need to give him daddy issues? And why did you need to make him some kind of reverse Michael Jackson when it came to children? The whole point of the story was to show Charlie being a good kid as opposed to say, Veruca or Mike or the other brats. It wasn't about daddy issues.
4. Any remake where they feel the need to make it "politically correct". Did you see the Wurthering Heights where Heathcliff got a race lift?

I can understand wanting to update a movie to change with the times. I mean, the original Karate Kid, even though it's a good movie, is kind of dated. A lot of the elements suggest that (such as the girls' hairstyles and the bad guys being blond pretty boy jerks, a staple of 80s teen movies).