10 Movie Remakes Nobody Expected Or Wanted

There's nothing inherently wrong with remaking a film. In fact, some of the greatest films of all time are remakes. And even when remakes aren't particularly good, there's usually some sort of logic as to why they got made, even if it is a cynical, financially motivated sort of logic. But sometimes there are remakes that don't make much sense to anyone. Films that make everyone ask, what was the point? So with that in mind, I'm Ellie for WhatCulture, and here are movie remakes nobody expected or wanted. The Italian Job The Italian Job is one of the great British films of the 1960s. A bunch of cheeky-chappy-cockney stereotypes led by Michael Caine in Debt Town Minis execute an audacious heist in Milan, all while trying to outwit the fearsome Italian Mafia. During production, Fiat offered to pay for all cars used and abused if the iconic trio of Mini Coopers were swapped for Fiat 500s. The filmmakers said no. And then there's the 2003 remake. It isn't necessarily bad. It's an enjoyable enough 2000s action film with some good set pieces, but it's hard not to feel like the Minis could have been swapped out for any other brand of car, and the film released under a totally different name, without anybody noticing. And unlike most questionable remakes, there isn't the argument that it's trying to bank on name recognition, since the original wasn't particularly successful in the United States. It doesn't even bother to remake cinema's most impressive and most literal cliffhanger. What is even the point? Psycho The original Psycho is one of the most iconic films ever made, made by one of the most influential directors ever to work in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock. Remaking it would be like trying to remake Citizen Kane or The Godfather. There's nothing you can add that would improve it, so why even bother? But the bizarre thing about Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake is that it doesn't try to add anything at all. Psycho isn't just similar to the original, it's basically a shot-for-shot remake. Same framing, same dialogue, same editing, same music, even the same special effects in some instances. The only noticeable differences are the actors, it being shot in colour, and some random abstract shots intercut with the murder scenes. Putting aside the fact that the original Psycho is shot the way it is specifically to take advantage of the black and white film that they were working with, and that Vince Vaughn's take on Norman Bates pales in comparison to Anthony Perkins, the biggest issue with this film is that it's impossible to get past the question of why. What could this possibly have been trying to achieve? The answer largely remains, well, who knows, the mummy. Universal's monster movies have a long and storied tradition in Hollywood, so it's not hugely surprising that eventually somebody somewhere decided the studio should have another crack at them. What was surprising was their decision to forgo any series of fun or adventure, and instead try and use it as a vehicle to jumpstart their already failing Dark Universe. The Dark Universe was Universal's attempt at copying the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and much like the DC Extended Universe, it tried to jump the gun and get straight to the team-ups without laying any of the groundwork. This is why we ended up with a mummy film where the secondary antagonist was Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, as well as one which spent half of its plot setting at Prodigium instead of having fun adventures. The most frustrating thing about The Mummy is that not only had previous remakes been successful, but also that many people did want a continuation of the franchise. What almost nobody was looking for, though, was generic Tom Cruise action film number 387, Red Dawn. There might not be any film more 1980s than the original Red Dawn, the story of a group of high school teens heroically defending their small middle American town from invading Russians during World War III. The film captures so much about the era that it's practically a time capsule. So, when MGM decided to have another go at it in the late 2000s, there were likely a few heads being scratched. The idea of Soviet troops parachuting into small-town USA was already stretching reality when the original was made, and was the sort of nonsense you could only get away with in the glorious days of 80s action cinema. Transplant that into a post-Cold War world and the idea of any country having both the justification and the resources to launch a full-scale land invasion of the USA becomes laughable. This is a problem the filmmakers soon ran into themselves when they realised that China, their original USSR replacement, was actually on comparatively good terms with the US in 2010, and would not appreciate their portrayal, to say nothing of the diminished box office receipts that would come from ditching the Chinese box office. To fix this, they replaced China in post-production with the second biggest baddie they could think of, North Korea, a country that, although in possession of a sizeable military, would not have the logistical capabilities of invading the United States. Red Dawn just isn't the sort of plot that made much sense in the 2010s, which explains why it failed on both a critical and commercial level. If the original Red Dawn is the mid-80s incarnates, then Point Break is the same for the early 90s. If someone had never heard of Point Break, all you would have to do is tell them the premise. Keanu Reeves is an FBI agent who must go undercover to infiltrate a bunch of surfer dude bank robbers, and they'd more than likely be able to guess which decade it was made and released in. Even Reeves' character's name, Johnny Utah, exudes that sort of 90s extreme with So, what do you get when you take a film that could most accurately be described as radical, and remake it in a post-2000 cynical, realism-obsessed media landscape? Funnily enough, you get a bland and uninspiring action film. In its defence, the 2015 remake got a fair amount of impressive extreme sports sequences, but it ended up taking itself way too seriously, and lost that genuine sense of fun that made the original film what it was. Also, how do you compete with Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, and Patrick Swayze? This remake lost the battle before it was even thought. There are some directors whose films have so much personality that it's impossible to imagine them being made by anyone else. There's a reason Tarantino films are Tarantino films before they're anything else. So, what happens when you try to remake a film that is defined by a director's style? Well, if 2012's Total Recall remake is anything to go by, you get something uninspiring. As with a lot of the other films on this list, Total Recall isn't terrible, it just isn't very good either. All of the style and atmosphere that made the Arnie-led original so beloved is gone, and in its place is generic 2010 sci-fi action. Most of the major changes sit somewhere between confusing and pointless, and everything that stays the same becomes a pale imitation of the original. Nothing sums up Total Recall better than how it deals with the is-it-a-dream plotline, taking one of the most interesting parts from the original, repeating it, and somehow making it totally uninteresting. It asks all the same questions, but never bothers to get you to care what the answers are. The Thing. 2011's The Thing isn't technically a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece. It's actually a prequel, depicting what happened at the Norwegian base right up to the original's iconic opening scene of a helicopter chasing a snow dog through the Antarctic desert. Counterpoint, it's literally called The Thing. It may link up narratively with Carpenter's original, but you could remove the mid-credits scene and call it a complete remake with next to no issue. It's closer to the 1982 film than it is to 1951's The Thing from Another World, which is the original original. Even a poster is pretty much a remake. If anything, the 2011 film's existence in the purgatory between remake and prequel puts it in a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. It manages to re-tread the beats of Carpenter's film with the bland monotony of the least inventive remakes, while simultaneously falling into the standard prequel trap of over-explaining minor details and providing answers to questions that nobody ever asks. Not quite one, not quite the other, and definitely not the continuation of The Thing that anybody was looking for or interested in. Get Carter Another instance of location swapping a British film to the USA, the Sylvester Stallone-fronted remake of Get Carter swaps out the Newcastle of 1971 for millennium-era Seattle, a difference so massive that swapping out the script wouldn't have made as much difference. Newcastle might not be in the title of Get Carter, but the northeast England city is an integral location as you'll ever find in a film. The city defines the original, arguably providing more character and personality than Carter himself. Taking a film so fundamentally rooted in time and place and shifting it to a different where and when was always going to be a questionable move. But it's not just that they moved it out of Newcastle, it's where they moved it too. America had no shortage of grim post-industrial decay in the late 90s, and somewhere like Detroit, Philadelphia or even Chicago could have had the potential for at least an attempt at translating the neglected northern atmosphere so important to the original's atmosphere. Seattle, however, is none of those things. What's left is a reasonably generic mid-2000s action movie that hits all the narrative beats of the original, but completely fails to maintain the one thing that tied it all together in the first place. Ben-Hur It's unlikely that there was anyone in the early 2010s who heard they're remaking Ben-Hur and thought it was a good idea. The 1959 Swords and Sandals epic was the second highest-grossing film of all time when it released, has been seen by millions on TV in the years since, and with 11 Oscars, shares the record for most Academy Award wins over 60 years later. Granted, the 1959 version was itself a remake, but considering 1925's Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ was a black-and-white silent film, it was really more of an adaptation than anything else. The 2016 version did not have that benefit. Nothing short of the greatest film of all time could avoid being a disappointment when compared to the originals. The result was rather predictable, hardly anyone went to see it, and those who did had few positive things to say about it. Cabin Fever It could be argued the original Cabin Fever was unexpected and unwanted, and it's not even a remake. Released in the midst of the early 2000s, it follows a group of friends as they slowly succumb to an aggressive flesh-eating virus. It's a fine enough film if you like that sort of low-budget schlocky horror where a bunch of drunk horny teens go out to a cabin in the woods and die horribly, but it wasn't exactly revolutionary and didn't have much mass-market appeal. It didn't make much of an impact, and after a couple of straight-to-DVD sequels, the franchise quickly slipped into dormancy. So, it's both surprising and more than a little confusing that in 2016, only 16 years after its premiere, a remake was released. Even more baffling, it's mostly the same film again. While not a shot-for-shot remake like Psycho, the new Cabin Fever still retreads the original pretty much beat for beat. Even the deaths, one of the biggest draws for this type of film, are nearly all identical, just with slightly updated special effects. Cabin Fever is perhaps the epitome of an unexpected, unwanted remake. Nobody was crying out for it before it was made, and nobody cares now that it exists.