20 Classic Hollywood Movies: Original vs. Remake

Hey gang, listen, hot take here: originality is dead! Hollywood just makes remakes and reboots these days! And so on. By now, that sentiment is itself the glossy, big-budget Hollywood remake of every other time people have said originality is dead during the history of cinema. But “remakes” have existed since forever. Heck, we bet even Homer was drawing from old stories and just giving them a more epic Hollywood treatment. And yes, of course, something something joke about how lame Troy was. Anyway, if remakes are just a part of, well, the human activity of telling stories, then no wonder they’re also a big part of the history of Hollywood. So let’s get to it. 

In this Pictofact, we compare classic movies, most of them from classic Hollywood, to their legacies and especially their remakes. We’re mostly ignoring franchises like the James Bond series. Instead, we’re focusing on classic movies and, even if they do have sequels, their modern, recent, or contemporary reenvisionings. Some patterns emerge. For example, the number of actually awesome remakes is not low, and you’ll see some examples that’ll make you say, “dammit, that is an awesome remake!” To which we’ll smugly reply, “we know.” Other movies have several remakes during different periods of Hollywood history, while others are long overdue their contemporary retellings. So call us, Hollywood: we have this idea of a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, it’ll be awesome, it can’t possibly fail.