"It's not a remake; it's a new movie based on the same source"

Cafe Society
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I watched the 2021 film Nightmare Alley last night. I didn’t think I’d like it, but I did. There was an earlier film of the same name in 1947 starring Tyrone Power, based on the same book by William Lindsay Gresham that had come out the previous year. It’s common to call the 2021 film a “remake”, but director Guillermo del Toro was very insistent that his film wasn’t a rmake, using the title of this thread as his argument.

I appreciate his point – he’s not trying to redo the earlier film, he’s making his own adaptation of the source – but it’s really a pointless argument. Almost any time someone does another version of the same base story they aren’t trying to remake the film, but the original source.

Neither the SciFi channel version of Dune nor the recent Denis Villeneuve film were efforts to remake the David Lynch version of Dune. All three were attempts to film Frank Herbert’s novel. When John Huston and Ray Bradbury made their 1956 film Moby Dick they were trying to film Melville’s novel, not remake John Barrymore’s 1926 film The Sea Beast. John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing was based on John Campbell’s original story – it wasn’t an attempt to remake the 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film. And so on.

So when IS a film an attempt to remake an earlier film, and not another effort to independently film the original source story/novel/ whatever?

1.) If there is no original source other than the first movie. Akira Kurasawa’s classic The Seven Samurai was an original screenplay, owing nothing to any earlier source. So The Magnificent Seven really IS a remake of the film. (And so is Battle Beyond the Stars. And, arguably, A Bug’s Life.) Kurasawa’s movie Rashomon might have been inspired by two Akutagawa short stories, but they were cobbled together to make a completely new story. When Martin Ritt made The Outrage in 1964, he “westernized” Rashomon (the way The Magnificent Seven did The Seven Samurai), but it was a remake of the film, not an attempt to adapt the Akutagawa stories. The 1976 and 2005 films KIng Kong were clearly remakes of the 1933 film King Kong, because the story was written for that film.

And there are plenty of other examples.

2.) When the same director is clearly re-doing his own original work. So Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is a remake of his 1934 film of the same name (which had no original source). Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) is a remake of his silent film from 1923(or at least the portions from the first section), right down to copying some of the same sets. And Tod Browning’s 1935 Mark of the Vampire is a remake of his 1927 film London After Midnight, and not an attempt to film the original short story The Hypnotist (which Browning himself wrote).

3.) When the “remake” film more closely follows the earlier version of the film than the source material. The Steven Soderburgh/George Clooney film Solaris (2002) is clearly a remake of Tarkovski’s 1972 film Solaris rather than a new attempt to interepret Stanislas Lem’s original novel. The second film pretty much follows the first, departing from the novel in exactly the same ways and leaving out the same things. It’s as if they wanted to have Tarkovski’s film with more up-to-date special effects.

Sometimes the “remake” is pretty much a remake in title only, even if there is no original source material. For some reason this is especially true of science fiction and horror films – The House on Haunted Hill, Thirteen Ghosts, The She Creature, The Old Dark House, etc. etc. ad nauseam. The “remakes” have little or nothing to do with the supposed inspiration.

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You are missing one of the most obvious (to me, at least) ones: True Grit.

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Another example of this category would probably be Evil Dead and Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, where the first act of the latter movie was basically the same as the first movie. Except that one didn’t get called a remake, but a sequel.

2001 / 2010 deserves a mention, here, despite being another sequel, in that in the book of 2001, they went to Saturn, but in the movie, it was Jupiter, and both book and movie of 2010 went all-in on it being Jupiter. Though I understand that it’s not unambiguous that the book was “the original”.

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3.) When the “remake” film more closely follows the earlier version of the film than the source material.

I think this would apply to Tim Burton’s Planet of The Apes because he tried to end it with plot twist like the 1968 movie and not the original novel.

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Have you read Pierre Boulle’s original novel? Because it ends with a plot twist very much like the Tim Burton movie – the astronaut goes back to Earth (unlike the 1968 film), and finds apes in charge on Earth (the planet he spent the bulk of the story in was NOT the Earth). Burton’s version is actually closer to the novel in those regards than the 1968 movie – they just used an ape in the “Lincoln” memorial to dramatize the moment.

Actually, neither film version is all that faithful to Boulle’s original novel.

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No I never read the novel. I was under the impression the twist was created Rod Serling—I apologize for the error.

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And then there’s the 2013 version of Evil Dead, which has a different cast of characters in the same basic situation as the original movie, which plays out quite differently and has a very different ending.

On another note, there’s The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and I Am Legend, all of which are independent adaptations of the Richard Matheson novel of the same name as the third film (although the third takes more than a few cues from the second).

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No, Serling created the “I’m back on Earth!” twist (although the dramatic presentation with the

Statue of Liberty – do I really have to spoiler it after all this time?

was the work of the director. Serling had used the same “twist” in his Twilight Zone TV series more than once. – but it’s a really stupid twist. You’d think the fact that the apes were speaking English and that the Forbidden Zone artifacts were identical to ones from Earth would’ve clued Taylor in.

But in Boule’s novel, as in Burton’s film, the place he spends most of his time isn’t the Earth.

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I never saw either version of True Grit, and never read the novel.

Which category does this fall into? Was the second film a remake of the first, both with significant changes from the novel, or are both films adaptations of the original novel?

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I am not sure if the situation with the 1931 film Frankenstein applies here or not

but I will mention it because most film(and pop culture) portrayals of The Monster have been influenced more by Boris Karloff’s(and Universal’s) portrayal of him as a lumbering mute brute and NOT the more intelligent speaking creature depicted in the novel.

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Both are adaptations of the novella. Each one skips some material from the story and each adds some new material. I didn’t study the three closely enough to notice if the second movie contained any material that was unique to the first movie. They are all worth giving a try. (I think the second movie is better, both as a movie and as an adaptation.)

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Frankenstein is a special case, not really in this category. No one claims it to be a remake of the 1910 “Edison” film. It’s not even a remake of its nominal immediate source, Peggy Webling’s stage play, let alone Shelley’s novel.

It’s true that the image of the monster that emerged from that 1931 film – both his appearance and actions – has become iconic, and THAT has been widely copied. But the 1931 film is not itself a remake, and has not itself been remade. Later attempts to film the story don’t imitate the movie (or Webling’s play), but go back to the novel itself. And usually then stray pretty far from it.

You could say much the same about Dracula – the movie version is an elaboration on the New York stage play by John Balderston, which was a variation on the stage play by Hamilton Deane. (Balderston wrote the screenplay, and was one of the hands responsible for the Frankenstein script for that matter. He wrote The Mummy, too.). By the time it was finished, the 1931 movie was its own thing, and certainly not a remake of Nosferatu. Films, in fact, since they made the spanish-language version at the same time, with what was essentially a translation of the English-language script). But subsequent film versions of the story were NOT remakes of the 1931 film. Not even the 1979 Frank Langella film, which also had its genesis in the Balderston stage play.

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3.) When the “remake” film more closely follows the earlier version of the film than the source material.

This has been part of Disney’s movie strategy --remaking their old fully animated films as live-action/CGI photo-realistic movies. The remakes follow closely with Disney originals and NOT the source material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_live-action_adaptations_and_remakes_of_Disney_animated_films

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No kidding? I recommend you watch the first film, then read the novel, and finally watch the second film. That’s how I encountered them in my life and I think it worked out well; I enjoyed all three.

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Earlier I called True Grit a novella. I see that the word count is around 60,000 so it technically a novel, but on the very bottom end by modern standards

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The Jackal in 1997.

Frederick Forsyth wrote the novel The Day of the Jackal in 1971. It was about a professional hitman targeting Charles de Gaulle. It was made into a movie in 1973.

In 1997, there was a remake. But Forsyth didn’t like the remake and refused to let his name be used in association with the new movie. So the new movie was credited as being based on Kenneth Ross’ 1973 movie script rather than on Forsyth’s novel.

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Total Recall (2012) is clearly a remake of Total Recall (1990) and not really a separate adaptation of “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”.

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Is there a special category for intentional shot-by-shot remakes of the original like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho?

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Excellent example.

Incidentally, as I’ve frequently written about this film, only the first twenty minutes or so derives from Philip K. Dick’s story. I’ve long felt that the bulk of the film was taken, with attribution, from Robert Sheckley’s satirical novel The Status Civilization.

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I wasn’t aware of this little maneuver.

Forsyth’s novel is one of my all-time favorites, and so is Fred Zinneman’s 1973 film adapted from it. I agree that the 1997 film is abysmal.