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?