Idea and concept

Since the early days of Hollywood, there's been constant search for good scripts and good ideas for the production of motion pictures. While the Hollywood of that time didn't have a source to look up to, nowadays the pool of the films is really tremendous. So in the lack of a good idea, the major studios can always turn to some hit from the past within it's own archive, within the European (especially French) or World production or the not-so-famous works of the good US authors, even the flocks that had a good potential in their core. That is how the initial idea of the remake is born.

What is a remake anyway? In general terms, it is a movie based on other movie – instead of the book, a novel, a comic or any other media. The reasons to do a remake can be numerous, whether it's of pure commercial nature - in most cases - as a plan to repeat the success of the original, or the artistic ones as of correcting the lame interpretation of a good idea. Remakes can be of any genre, but seems like the most numbered are horror remakes. There are thriller remakes, comedy remakes, and even the kind that switched genre in the process.

In more specific sense, we have to analyze the scale of the similarity to the original. You can't just borrow the main characters, make another movie and call it a remake. So all the sequels regarding James Bond, Indiana Jones, Rocky or Rambo cannot be consider as remakes.

However, some elements from the original movie must exist in the remake, especially the story or just the part of it. While deciding which movie is remake and which is not, I take in consideration the similarity between two movies and call it a 'Relation'. The relation can be rated from 1 to 5, depending on similarity. Lowest rating has the movie in which the director put just a 'touch' or hint of an original, and the highest goes to shot-by-shot remake. For example, Tarantino borrowed the code names of the robbers from 'Taking Of Pelham 123' (Mr. Black, Mr. Green... etc.) in his 'Reservoir Dogs', so the relation between those two movies is very low, rated 1. On the other hand, Gus Van Sant practically copied Hitchcock's 'Psycho' so the relation between them is rated 5, a pure deja-vu experience.

Since I mentioned the low relation factor, some movies were just inspired by other movie in order to present a totally different story. For example, Jean Pierre Melville was a French director crazy about Hollywood gangster and crime movies. His absolutely independent masterpiece 'Le Samurai' is a story about an assassin whose character was obviously inspired by Alan Ladd's character in 'This Gun For Hire'; both were baby-faced silent cold blood killers wearing the raincoat. That type of movies are categorized as Inspired by.

Regarding to the chronological aspect, we can wonder sometimes who copied who, so the section that analyzes the films released within the short period is called Strange coincidence.
That happened on several occasions in the Hollywood history, especially early 1990-ties, when there was a release of 'Wyatt Earp' and 'Tombstone', two movies that could be remakes of each other but both of them were released within time period of just few months, so we can't be sure. Another 'strange coincidence' happened in 1992, when two Columbus stories,  '1492: Conquest of Paradise' and 'Christopher Columbus: The Discovery' were released. So basically, this section covers the movies that you saw almost at the same time and you couldn't believe how they looked alike.

In most cases, the remake is made by the author who didn't shoot the original, from the obvious reasons. Sometimes, there are ex-ceptions to that rule. Even the greatest movie directors like Alfred Hitchcock remade their own movies ('The Man Who Knew Too Much') because of the need to tell the same story in a better way - meaning better production ter-ms. Some European authors who came in Hollywood made the remakes of their previous films there, such as Ole Bornedal ('Nightwatch') and George Sluizer ('The Vanishing'). That is the Re-authored section.

As I mentioned before, there are some remakes with the high relation to the original, made shot-by-shot. But there are also completely different and independent movies that used the shot-by-shot technique in order to remake some scene(s) from the previous movie. The best known example is Tim Burton's 'Ed Wood', the movie about 'worst film director of all times Edward D. Wood Jr.' in which Burton made realistic re-shots of some scenes from Wood's movies. I took those movies in consideration also while analyzing the movie remaking phenomena, in Reshot scenes section.

Finally, there is a section simply called Wow!. That is what I sounded like when I saw some Turkish or Indian remakes of 'Superman'. You get the picture.

This site is not about hating remakes. It's not about loving remakes either. It is an objective attempt to examine the remake phenomena.

In most cases, remakes are worst than original. But, there's always something positive in that fact. To quote asakawa_k as he posted at one forum, "remake helps the original film to reach a huge audience which it would never have ordinarily reached" and "the original makers get paid a lot for the rights to remake their film".

So please browse through the large collection of the originals and their remakes and I'm sure that you will find something of your interest. Better yet, feel free to comment on a remake that you saw recently as you most likely did because you just can't escape from the remakes if you watch the recent Hollywood production.

The list of film remakes on this site is not final list! The collection is growing every day and there are plenty of reviews to come... I count on your help!

Dabac,

the editor