The Great Remakes – about the series
As Hollywood cinema entered its second century, the number of remakes, reboots, and reimaginings cranked out by studios seemed to increase tenfold. Many of us lament the uninspired, risk-averse, and often cynical practice of recycling recognizable titles to capitalize on audience nostalgia. Still, not every attempt to redo, update, or further explore a movie subject is a blasphemous aberration cooked up by uncreative bean counters and produced with disposable stars and hack directors. In the past century of movies, it’s not hard to find remakes that are as good or even better than the films they were based on. Or, at least, remakes that make fascinating and insightful counterparts to the earlier works.
Despite concerns that inferior new versions will tarnish or replace the legacy of the original pictures we hold dear, few remakes diminish or eclipse either the artistic impact or historical significance of the films they capitalize on. In the long term, the version that remains in our collective cultural memory is “the best movie.” That’s most often the original version, though not always.
But what is a remake? By Hollywood studio standards, a remake is another film made from a property they own that they’ve already made into a movie. But by that logic, The Maltese Falcon, The Letter, Holiday, The Haunting, Romeo + Juliet, and Little Women would all be remakes. Yet these films aren’t remakes of earlier pictures; they are new adaptations of great novels or plays. A true remake, as we’re defining it here, is either a new take on a film that had an original screenplay or an adaptation of intellectual property that takes inspiration from a prior screen version of that material.
This series of double features pairs films in which both the original and the remake are solid movies. In most instances, there are an equal number of passionate fans of both works who could make the case for why their favorite is the better picture. The Great Remakes series celebrates films where both versions are terrific movies that complement each other in a variety of ways.
– Ian Brownell, series curator