10 Remakes That Are Way More Famous Than the Original Film

Sometimes it feels like every other movie that comes out in theaters is a sequel or a remake or a legacyquel of something that came before. There are a lot of remakes and reboots swirling around cinemas right now, it’s true, but the real truth is it’s always been this way. Hollywood has always mined its own content for inspiration, with directors and studios going out of their way to buy the rights to lesser-known or foreign-made films that speak to them, or studios deciding once a couple decades have passed that it’s time to revisit their earlier projects.

We’d be willing to bet that a few of the movies you love are remakes of other movies, because, a lot of the time, remakes can be really good! On rare occasions, they’re so good that people forget they were remakes at all, content to imagine that this version is the only version of the story that’s ever existed.

This can happen for a few reasons. The original film was old. The original film was not very good. The new film has more famous actors in it. The new film is better. Maybe it’s as simple as recency bias — we know more and care more about the stuff that’s happening right now, as opposed to whatever was going on decades ago. However it happens, remakes sometimes overtake their source material completely, so that it’s difficult to imagine these movies any other way. Original ideas are great and all, but sometimes all it takes is improving on a classic.