You bring up a good point about remakes in Hollywood but lately it's not just movies being remade. It's pretty much any material in any source of Media. They're remaking tv shows now for god's sake. I'm not saying they haven't remade movies before but if you could compare the number of remakes that have been made in the last...ten years or so and compare it with any other time, I'm postive the list would be unquestionably longer. I do believe they are running out of ideas though. I'll give u a little history explanation.
In the beginning of movies, before sound, all movies were considered a source of entertainment and anyone could go see them. After a while when so many movies were made of a type, they started to classify different movies into generes. This was early on. Hollywood has been remaking movies since forever. They were remaking movies before sound was even invented! There's a short short film called "The kiss" which was made really early on like in 1910. It was basically about a kiss long and that was the whole short. They remade that movie in...1926 I think and it was practically the same thing so I guess it's in Hollywood's blood to remake movies but now, it appears there is almost never a time when a movie isn't in theaters that's a remake or atleast something is coming out of any media being remade.
It's not hard to believe they are running out of ideas either. I couldn't guess how many movies Hollywood has made since the beginning of its time. Probably close to ten thousand or more. With that amount of titles in existence it becomes hard to make a movie that doesn't resemble a movie already made. It happens anyway like The Matrix (similar sub-plot to the terminator movies, ID4, The Day After Tomorrow, Back to the future, The godfather, etc). There's only so many things you can do with a cast of characters in a certain setting. I'm not saying that Hollywood will never come out with an original or close-to original great movie again, I'm just saying they're going to be fewer and further between. It will eventually be divided up into about maybe two or three hundred different types of movies. Each type would be based on the the combination of three parts, the genere, the plot and the character relationship emphasis. Looking at this, it evidently looks like their would be more than two or three hundred different types but a lot of the the three different aspects of a movie put together wrong just wouldn't work and people wouldn't like it so that scales it down. Example: "A sci-fi movie about a dysfunctional family held up in their house after after an alien hit the hood of their car ". See what I mean? It's not exactly endless. I predict maybe 300 diferent situations would work in a movie.
People (the commen people) used to think movies would get better and better with technology to bring them the ultimate movie experiences. Well, that doesn't happen too often because a good movie depends much more upon the screenplay, the actors and their performances in the movie. Nowaday's you can make a dazzling looking CGI fest pretty cheap. It's the story that really makes the movie and even stories are getting used up. For instance, a lot of books,good books, will never become movies because they're just not interesting enough to put on a silver screen. A lot of books focus on the relationships more than an unusual happening that people want to see.
It can make for excellent reading because the characterization helps a lot but there are only so many things you can get across in a movie itself, let alone effectively get it across to the audience. I don't know if I explained this well enough but I tried to. Just lets say there are maybe 300 different, individually original stories that can be told on the screen.
That's all I'm gonna say. I'm done.