*sigh*  Damn you movie re-makers, damn you all. There’s no shortage of script ideas out there, I think producers and studios are just too scared to greenlight edgier projects. Instead, they think rebooting or remaking a franchise is the better bet.

I can understand the concept of rebooting/reimagining/or remaking a movie from a financial aspect. You have alot of movies, especially from the 80′s, that were made on tiny budgets but had a fantastic idea at it’s core. With modern day techonologies and a little extra money, there’s a good chance you can turn it into something that will make money, and it’s a safe choice, but is it the right choice. By taking a great movie and remaking it, I can’t help but feel your tarnishing the memory of the original.   

How often does it happen though that the remake is better than the original? It doesnt happen very often, despite the huge amount of remakes out there. There are a few gems out there, but they are very, very rare.

Let’s take a look at some good exmaples first. Chris Nolan’s Batman series has been great. However, I’m still a fan of Tim Burton’s late 80′s take on it, so no big deal to me. But it’s Batman, you can reboot it once a decade and it will still take in the billions at the box office. Ocean’s 11 was a great modern take on the original Rat pack flick, but again, the original was already fantastic. I guess that’s why alot of these older movies get remade, they know it was a great movie, but time to throw in some new hot bodies and cash in. Is this going to happen every 20 years, a successful movie is going to get remade with the new up and coming stars. I really don’t want to be seeing a redo of Iron Man in 2030 starring Sandra BUllock’s shiney new baby.

What about remakes that are better than the original? I can think of only a few examples, and I challenge you to come with some solid examples. I think John Carpenter’s The Thing is the best horror movie ever made. It was a remake from the 50′s movie, and is a classic example of a movie with a great story, that was able to take advantage of a bigger budget, a better cast, and some modern (well, modern in the 80′s) technology for special effects. That being said, how many people know it was a remake? Not many..  Along the same lines, the Fly and King Kong are some other examples. But geez, were talking about movies from the 30′s and 50′s here..  of course technology from 50 years down the road is going to make it look cool. But, some other examples.. very, very few.

The whole I am Legend series is good to look at. Last man on Earth from the 60′s was “ok”, based quite truthfully on the short story by Richard Matheson. Remade in the 70′s as the Omega Man with Charton Heston, it was fantastic although strayed quite a bit from the literature. But damn, his aprtment battle bunker was beyond awesome. Then we came back to the original story a “bit” with the Will Smith version, but the super fast feral CGI monsters completely ruined it..   and I didn’t like it all.

Evil Dead 2, despite being a sequel, was actually a remake of the first one once the guys got a decent budget together. The first movie still holds alot of charm though, but it is a rare example of a remake that was better than the original. 

I could go over some more remakes that were decent, but my whole point of this post is discussing the huge amount of remakes currently in the works. I’d like to list off the remakes that were failures or just bad, but come on, I’d be listing hundreds of movies here and that would take forever. I really want to rant on about the crap coming down the pipe.

So, have some patience, there’s alot of shit on the way and here comes the list of the more notable ones coming up. Keep in mind, I skipped over alot and just mentioned the ones I thought were noteworthy. Triple the number of what I have listed below, and that’ll give a more accurate number on what’s being worked on.

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