The double-edge sword of remakes: The reason you make one is to capitalize on an audience’s familiarity with a beloved property, but you also can’t make something that feels too familiar, or that same audience will think they’ve seen your new movie already and they’ll pass on buying a ticket. As a result, there’s a push and pull going on behind the scenes of every remake, with their creators weighing how close to stay (or how far to stray) from their source material.
When filmmakers lean toward the latter, you get titles the like ten on the list below — which all qualify as remakes, but are also so different from the movies that inspired them that they technically belong to an entirely different genre than their cinematic predecessors. Some go even further; they’re set in different countries and different time periods. One or two openly mock the movie they are based on. Sometimes they feature people bursting into song just for kicks. (When I burst into song just for kicks I get arrested. When A Star Is Born does it, it wins Oscars! That doesn’t seem fair at all.)
A significant number of these remakes prove the malleability of their source material; some samurai movies worked equally well (or better) as westerns, for example. Others backfired spectacularly. (Just because your not-very-scary horror movie is beloved by fans of so-bad-it’s-good nonsense does not mean it deserves a full-bown comedy remake.) But they are all notable because they turned an old movie into a new film a totally novel way.
Remakes That Switched Genres
These movies remade films while totally changing their genres in the process.
READ MORE: Sequels You Forgot Even Existed
Movies That Were Supposed to Be Huge, Then Flopped
These movies were expected to become massive hits in theaters. Unfortunately, that’s not how things turned out at all.