Great films you just can't re-make

This is my first post, forgive me if i come off sounding like a reject.

What great films out there would you not want to see re-made?
I was thinking of such films as The Breakfast Club, Top Gun etc

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Nice thread. It's hard to try and guess what will or won't be remade, nothings sacred. I'd have to say the obscure gems or World Cinema that are probably a bit too explicit/controversial for an mass American market, though Oldboy is meant to be making the cross over. I'd say any successful Hollywood movie with in 20 years should be safe (i.e. anything in the 18-25 year old market's memory), can't think of top my head any that have been done, undoubtedly there will have been lol. I'm pretty sure the work of Fellini and Godard etc is safe

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You can't remake

Casablanca or The Godfather. The characters created by the actors are just too iconic.

(Although, believe or not there was a TV remake of Casablanca in 1955 and a short run TV show based on it)

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"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."- Groucho Marx

2001 - A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1969)



This is one film that I think should never be touched as far as remakes are concerned.

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Great choice! I agree that Kubrick in general should not be touched. I think that any film can be remade, but should it be? There is so much talent out there, writers, directors who actually have original ideas, wow imagine that!

Too many remakes, far too many for all the creativity out there.

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"You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do." -David Cronenberg

Probably any genuine "great" film wouldn't be advisable to be remade since the thing about a great film is that it seizes to be a movie and starts to be a memory. Any great movie would make it seem like you are there yourself that if feels like reality itself, so my answer would be all great films can never be remade because if they can be remade then they are not that great.

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, , never remake, To Kill a Mockingbird

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Psycho?

In addition to the confirmed classics, I reckon there are two things of films I think should not be remade: most Oscar winners (especially Best Picture winners - whoever heard of someone wanting to remake The Godfather?) and cult classics (even the B-grade ones such as Repo Man). However, the latter gets broken a fair bit though (especially in regards to horror movies), but yeah, more often than not the remakes are heavily criticised.

So yeah, cult classics or regular classics.

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Nuff' said. In fact, I am very confident that this masterpiece of neo noir will never be touched no matter how tempted the director is.



Should never be remade aswell. This film is almost a masterpiece and easily the best film Cronenberg has ever made. Roll on Eastern Promises.

Lots of surrealist films, Bunuel, Jodorawsky, etc.

I don't think it is so much 'greatness' that makes a film impossible to effectively re-make. Films whose strengths are conventional - great pacing, great but not necessarily iconic performances, great stories etc. - can be effectively re-made (though it may work better as to re-imagine it in some major way, i.e. Yojimbo --> A Fistful of Dollars). The films that can never work as re-makes are those that are the product of true auteurs working in radically iconic styles or dealing with intensely personalized thematic material (say Wong Kar-Wai or early Bergman) or films driven by larger than life performances (like Jack Nicholson at his peak).

Jewel Robbery, Dr. Strangelove, Jaws, Elmer Gantry, Pinocchio (oops!), Alice in Wonderland, Paths of Glory, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon (third time's the charm), etc.

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What's odd about it all is that Hollywood is obviously motivated by success to remake films of the past. In general, I'm not opposed to remakes but I am very choosy about which ones I watch (for no other reason than lack of interest usually).

I don't see the point in the Psycho remake because it was intentionally a 'shot for shot' remake and the point of the thing eluded me (though I watched it out of curiosity).

I don't think I'd be offended by any remake, Hollywood just shouldn't count on receiving money from my wallet when they choose that course of action.

It's interesting that you mention Yojimbo and its remake as A Fistful of Dollars. I've always been amazed that no one ever seemed to mention those antecedents when Last Man Standing came along, when a blindman could see it's all the same story. However, it's not just the difference in the settings among those films; I can see a definite progressive decrease in quality of the cast, script, and general production values of each film.

As for "larger than life performers," Robert Mitchum with his dinky little straw hat was a lot more scarier as the ex-con bent on revenge in Cape Fear than Robert De Niro with all of his jailhouse tattoos in the remake. And I still prefer John Garfield and Lana Turner in the original version of The Postman Always Rings Twice over Nicholson and Jessica Lange in the remake (plus the original had the added attraction of Hume Cronyn, who is always a delight to watch on the screen). Lange’s career suffered from her appearance in the first remake of King Kong. Regardless of all the new technology used in two remakes of that film, it’s still the original with its stop-action figurine that is regarded as the true classic.

Hollywood used to do a lot of remakes, likely more than they do now, simply because they already had a script in hand and a lot of actors and directors sitting around under contract--and more demand for films from more people going to more theaters more often each week. So if a story had made a successful film before, they weren't above either reissuing or reshooting the original. Even classic film noir projects with top stars like Bogart and Ida Lupino in High Sierra got reshot in 1955 with Jack Palance reprising Bogart's role as an ex-con on the run in I Died a Thousand Times with Shelly Winters as his love interest or even as a Western with Joel McCrae and Virginia Mayo in Colorado Territory. It's interesting to watch what such different actors do with the same roles in the three versions of that film.

Of course there are some films that are so well known and so well loved that it's hard to imagine any remake, like Gone With the Wind. But I wonder what that film would be like if remade from a Gosford Park approach where the story is told strictly from the servants' points of view. Even films starring unique actors like Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera has been remade as a movie and even taken to the stage as a musical. And The Cheap Detective managed to make fun of key elements from such classics as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Even Bogey himself was successfully reworked in Play It Again, Sam.

But then if one can successfully remake Shakespeare time after time, I suppose one can remake anything. Macbeth for instance has been filmed many times, including a very artistic version in 1948 with Orson Welles chewing the sparse scenery in the title role. Yet it was remade in 1991 as struggle for power within organizied crime in the very well performed Men of Respect, with John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz, Dennis Farina, Rod Steiger, and Peter Boyle.

Why, they even revamped 3:10 to Yuma. But don't get me started on that again!

Me too

I'm gonna go with The Trilogy on this one.

And yes I mean Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars.

When it comes to Star Wars I am a purist. I hate the "Special Editions" and I shudder at the acting in 1-3 (though I do like the jedi fight scenes).

If anyone tried to remake the original films (beyond the tampering that George Lucas is already guilty of) I think I would die a bit inside. There is no way that magic can be re-captured (see Episodes 1-3 if you don't believe me ).

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As with most people here, I agree that remaking any classic is at the very least, a dangerous thing. However, updating in minor ways can be a good thing.
Take the original Star Wars films. All they did was add a little here and there, and update the graphics. None of it altered the movies in a major way, but I appreciated the updates (upgrades?).

On the flip side of this, I did a quick search on the forum for "films that SHOULD be remade" to see if my next thought had been discussed before, and one thread did come up, but it wasn't really what I'm thinking. My question really goes the opposite way - What movies really should be remade, because the original was done so poorly, especially when it comes to having hacked the original source material to bits.
I thought about this because of a remake that is coming out that I think (hope) will come off better - I Am Legend. I'm sure you all know what movie this is a remake of. I honestly don't know just how faithfully the new one will follow the original, but from what I have read, it is supposed to be a heck of a lot closer than Omega Man was. Now, there was actually another film made prior to that, called The Last Man on Earth, but I don't know anything about it, I've never seen it. So maybe this is a case of remaking a remake to fix the bad job done on the first remake?

And if you could follow that logic, you are doing pretty good!

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OK, now that was too funny... as I was writing my post, you put that one up about Star Wars...

In my opinion, no great film should be remade. I won't be impressed, until someone turns some of those awful films, into something worth watching.
Re-image some of those, Mr. Zombie!

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