Remakes?

Every single year movie theaters play tons of remakes of past movies that were successful enough that if they remade it, they would be able to turn a profit off of it. Usually the response from audiences are that though it was a good movie they thought that the original was the better. Why is this so? Just because someone tells you the story first that means that any other attempt at telling this story is going to fail in comparison simply because they were not first?


So I really have two question for today's blog. First, is the only reason that the original movie is better than a remake because that way of telling the story came first? Second, how much leeway do movie makers have on the setting, characters, plot, and overall story of remakes?


So the first question is, is the only reason that the original movie is better than a remake because that way of telling the story came first? My answer overall would be a no. There could be many different reason why a remake could be a bad movie. First of all, if just viewing the remake not as a remake but a stand alone movie it may just be a bad stand alone movie. The acting could be horrible, plot weak, the story may not flow; there are all sorts of reason why it could just be a bad movie. Now, if you are judging the movie as a remake and you are comparing it to the original and you feel like it did not met the stands that the original put in its place then it could be a bad remake. But is that the point of a remake, just to remake the original movie shot by shot, line by line? Or is the reason that someone would remake a movie is that they enjoyed bits and pieces of the story and they felt like if a few things changed then it would make the story better in some way?


The second question is, how much leeway do movie makers have on the setting, characters, plot, and overall story of remakes? If the point of the remake is not to just remake the movie scene by scene, line by line, but to add their own element of movie making or story telling to this already established story, then where is the line drawn for these people? Can they do whatever they want to the story, changing it so largely that by the end of the movie it does not even look like a remake at all? (A great example of this is the remake of a old television show the Honeymooners into a movie that was so different then the original show that you really could not tell that it was a remake. The title Honeymooners was the only thing that was not changed, basically). Who gets to make that decision of how much change is too much change for it to still remain a remake of the original movie?


I do not have an answer for this last one, and I don't think that anyone really does. It really depends on what feels right I guess. So I have a lot of questions without a lot of answers, tell me what you think. Where is the line? How much change is too much change? And is the original only good because it came out first?