It has become common in the past few decades to make updated versions of older films. This can be done for several reasons: the director may be a fan of the original work, the studios may want to capitalize on nostalgia, or the writers may want to approach the original plot from a different angle. A movie is not a remake if it is based on the same source as an earlier film, such as the 1967 and 1998 versions of Doctor Doolittle, which were both based on the book series.
A variation on The Remake is the Foreign Remake, an English version of a foreign movie. It can be between any two countries, such as The Ring, a Japanese film remade in the US.
The Video Game Remake is a subtrope of this, as is The Film of the Series.
TV shows can also be remade, but this is much rarer because of the tendency to instead make later series part of the same continuity as the earlier ones. When a series is remade it is often a Continuity Reboot as well.
It should be noted that remakes have existed almost as long as there have been movies.
Not to be confused with the REmake, which is a specific example of a Video Game Remake, or the 2006 Slasher MovieThe Remake.
Remakes are also similar to Continuity Reboots, and there is occasionally some overlap. However, one of the key differences between a straight remake and a Continuity Reboot is that anything can be remade, but only a long-running series can be rebooted. Re Tool is also often congruent with both Continuity Reboots and remakes.
Often, a Tone Shift will be part of the Remake.
The 1961 Parent Trap already was the third adaptation of the same book, Erich Kästner's Das doppelte Lottchen, and thus can itself legitimately be described as a Foreign Remake.
The 2007 version of Sleuth. Notable in that it kept one of the original leads, but in the opposite role.
The 1982 version of The Thing (1982), which is also more loyal to the book (Who Goes There?) than the original film, The Thing From Another World. The film got harsh reviews in its day, which is not surprising given how audiences had just been enchanted by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
An unusual triple threat: Leo McCarey's Love Affair (1939), starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, was remade (by Leo McCarey) as An Affair to Remember (1957) with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant, which was remade again (by a different director) as Love Affair (1994) with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. Ironically, An Affair to Remember is regarded as the best of the three, which has led to a general assumption that An Affair to Rememberwas the original.
Heaven Can Wait (1978) was a remake of the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and itself was remade in 2001 as Down to Earth. It has nothing to do with the 1943 film Heaven Can Wait (directed by Ernst Lubitsch).
The 1939 The Wizard of Oz was a remake of a version made in 1925, which also wasn't the first Oz film. There were two silent-era versions of Oz. The earliest one can be viewed here.
In the 70's, we would have The Wiz and later, The Muppets made their own version. Both involved veteran Muppeteer FrankOz.
The 1983 version of Scarface is also a little better known than the 1932 version. And that one is probably better known than the version made in 1928.
The play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur was first adapted into a movie in 1931, starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Howard Hawks remade it in 1940 as His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russel, gender-flipping the role of reporter Hildy Johnson. In 1974 Billy Wilder flipped Hildy Johnson's gender back to male in his screen adaptation with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Then in 1988 Ted Kotcheff remade it for the satellite television age with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner, flipping Hildy back to female.
Disney was to have released a motion-capture remake of Yellow Submarine in 2012 with Robert Zemeckis directing it, but it was scuttled after going over budget and Zemeckis' 2011 film Mars Needs Moms tanking at the box office.
Believe it or not, the 1986 John Woo movie, A Better Tomorrow, the movie that kickstarted the Heroic Bloodshed genre, was actually a remake of a 1967 Cantonese movie called Ying Xiong Ben Se or "Story of a Discharged Prisoner." Tsui Hark had been toying with the idea since his days in the TV business, but because of an overwhelming workload, Hark had to pass the directorial reins to Woo.
Nightwatch, a remake of the Danish film Nattevagten.
Jungle 2 Jungle, a remake of the French film Un indien dans la ville.
The Point of No Return, a remake of the French film Nikita.
Some Like It Hot, an elaborated remake of the 1951 West German film Fanfaren der Liebe.
Taxi, the 2003 remake of the French original.
Father's Day, the 1997 remake of the French film Les Compères
The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs
The 2010 remake of the 2007 movie Death At a Funeral. Bizarrely unneeded, as the original came out not even three years before the film was made, has one of the same actors returning for the same character, and is exactly the same in every way except the characters are black.
The Debt, a 2011 remake of the 2007 Israeli film by the same name.
Just Visiting, a remake of the French film Les Visiteurs.
Welcome to Collinwood, the 2002 remake of the Italian film I soliti ignoti, with George Clooney reprising Totò's role. The same film was also remade earlier with Louis Malle's 'Crackers'' (1984).
True Lies, a remake of the French film La Totale!.
The Magnificent Seven is a remake of the Japanese film Seven Samurai, which was then remade IN SPACE! as Battle Beyond the Stars, remade and computer animated as A Bug's Life, then remade yet again as the anime Samurai Seven.
Shall We Dance, the 2004 American remake of the 1996 Japanese movie. Neither is related to the 1937 movie musical of the same title.
Quarantine, a 2008 remake of the Spanish film Rec (2007).
Vanilla Sky was a remake of the Spanish Abre los Ojos.
With Penelope Cruz playing the same role in both movies!
King Kong vs. Godzilla is basically a remake of the original Kong for about 2/3 of the movie. The only difference is that he goes on to fight Godzilla and doesn't die in the end.
There was a Japanese remake of King Kong, which was the first Kaiju film. It was titled King Kong Appears in Edo. Sadly, this movie is lost.
There was a joint US/Korean production called A.P.E., which is famous for featuring the mom from Growing Pains and a giant monkey giving the finger to the military.
While not Asian, there is a Greek remake of King Kong as well.
France's Le Grand Chemin (1987) was remade in America four years later as Paradise with Thora Birch and Elijah Wood.
Down And Out In Beverly Hills was a remake of a French farce which translated is Boudu Saved From Drowning.
John Woo's 1986 classic A Better Tomorrow (which is itself a remake; see above) was remade in South Korea in 2010. Its Korean title is Mujeogja.
Remakes of foreign TV shows
NBC's The Office is the Americanized version of the BBC series. Well at least it didn't end up like their Coupling...
American Idol and its counterpart Canadian Idol are actually the US and Canadian versions of the hit British talent show, Pop Idol. This applies to any other show with the title *Insert Nationality Here* Idol.
Traffic was originally an English TV miniseries, remade as a Film Of The Series, which in turn was made into another US TV series.
Snavely was an attempt to make an americanized version of Fawlty Towers — starring Harvey Korman, no less — that died a quick and well-deserved death.
There was another attempt to remake it with Bea Arthur as the gender-swapped version of John Cleese's character.
The two Peter Cushing Doctor Who films of the mid-1960s are remakes of TV scripts (The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth), one of the many reasons they aren't canon.
A good chunk of Hispanic Soap Operas are either remakes of previous soaps (TV or radio) or adaptations of famous romantic books. One example who combine both is the famed "Corazón Salvaje" (title translates to Savage Heart), who began as a romantic novel, then was adapted as a soap in The Sixties, then later as a movie in The Seventies, and then again as a soap in The Nineties who unusually for the trope was claimed as the better version of them all.
Sadly, they remade it again in 2009, and ruined it again.
Game shows do this all the time. The best ones came during the '70s and '80s, where The Match Game became Match Game '7x, The Price Is Right evolved into The (New) Price Is Right, Pyramid kept climbing in dollar amounts, and Password would become Password Plus and later Super Password. There were numerous "Same shows, new hosts" examples as well, such as Family Feud (Richard Dawson, then Ray Combs) and Card Sharks (Jim Perry, then Bob Eubanks). More recent revivals tend to fall a bit flat by comparison (Match Game '98 with Michael Burger, Card Sharks '01...just, Card Sharks '01, Family Feud with pretty much everyone since Ray Combs — even an aged Richard Dawson — until John O'Hurley came along, and Pyramid with Donny Osmond).
On the other hand, GSN's remake of Lingo (hosted by Chuck Woolery) was actually superior to the original.
Same show, different name: Shenanigans (1960, local Los Angeles TV) became Video Village (1960) then became Shenanigans again (1964), P.D.Q. (1965) became Baffle (1973), Second Chance (1977) became Press Your Luck (1983), and Shoot For The Stars (1977) became Double Talk (1986).
Airplane!! takes its plot and much of its "straight" dialogue from the 1957 drama Zero Hour!.
The novel Beau Geste was adapted to film in 1926, 1939 and 1966. In 1977 a parody titled The Last Remake of Beau Geste was made. The title became not entirely true, because BBC made a television version in 1982.
Don Bluth's 1997 Anastasia is officially a Disneyfication/fantasticization of the 1956 Ingrid Bergman film (itself a play adaptation).
Fox specifically presented him with a list of works they owned the rights to that he could adapt. It boiled down to this or My Fair Lady.
Last Man Standing is a remake of a remake, being a remake of a Fistful of Dollars which was a remake of Yojimbo
Gus Van Sant's Psycho was, save for a gratuitous scene of Mister Bates... misterbating (sorry), and a couple scattered lines of dialogue, a shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock original.
If you'll believe it, a group of teenagers did a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 80s. It's really awesome.
Another non-TV or movie example: the first episode of Calvin and Hobbes: The Series became something of an Old Shame for the author when he was older, and when he was contacted to use it in a fanfiction play, he decided to rewrite it entirely and release it to the public in Season 3's bonus chapter.
