Destroying the Death Star.
I don’t think they can do *Forrest Gump *again…the first time was cool, after that, CGing a major character into historical events will just seem gimmicky.
Damnit, I came here to post that! 
And I’ll go with Sixth Sense and Blair Witch Project as well.
Except that it had been done before Forrest Gump, in Zelig, and was already gimmicky by the time of Forrest Gump. But Robert Zemeckis seems to be more interested in technological gimmicks than in a good script, so there you go.
I think it was Citizen Kane that did it first, but without the benefits of CGI.
another by M. Knight…
The Village
S^G
Depends how you define close, but Cloverfield made about $165 million worldwide, compared to Blair Witch’s $250 M or so.
I put Citizen Kane in the same camp, only its even less a big deal knowing beforehand than Crying Game.
They remade The Jazz Singer. But hearing the lead character break into song seemed a lot less impressive in 1980.
April Fool’s Day. A reasonably nicely done slasher-kill-the-hedonistic-teenagers movie, but the gimmick will NEVER work a second time.
I also challenge the OP’s premise that an “unexpected” plot twist must be a complete secret for a movie to be appreciated. If a movie is well-made, it shouldn’t matter that much whether you know the “surprise” plot elements or not before seeing it. People still see Macbeth, even though everyone knows he gets his head chopped off in the end.
For this reason I personally don’t mind “spoilers,” which even have their own HTML tag. If you tell me that the Stepford Wives is about a town where all the wives are automatons, I still might want to see it. And if I saw the first version, I’d gladly see a remake if I had it on good word that the cinematography and direction were good. There’s a lot more to a movie than plot.
In fact, most remakes aren’t very good precisely because all they focus on is the plot. They could be much better if they went beyond that.
Fight Club - most of Palahniuk’s (and Fincher’s) little tricks would be cliche and tacky now that they’ve been done once. That’s the genius of Palahniuk’s work, if you ask me.
It seemed to be all the rage after the Blair Witch Project, IIRC. Even George A. Romero, a man not given to copycat flops, put out a movie based on ‘recovered footage’ as recently as this February that, well, flopped.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the recovered-footage concept can “work”–but it was highly-anticipated at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it made its debut, meaning that a lot of people seemed to think it was still a workable idea.
I wouldn’t call that “close”, especially when you consider that $250 million went a little further in 2000.
The thing about a lot of remakes though is, familiarity with specific plot twists aside, they seem to take the attitude that because the original was something of a hit and because the plot is therefore already known, they don’t have to try very hard.
I’m all for remakes once a movie has given you inspiration to remake it, but use that inspiration as a reason to come up with something fresh to say (or a fresh way to say it), not to sit on your ass and let familiarity do the work for you.
You know he was nearly sued for stealing the plot from a children’s book, right? Apparently it can be done at least twice!
The Wizard of Oz.
Memento leaps to mind. It would be difficult to make another “backwards” movie without being derivative and redundant.
Except, of course, if people don’t know of or don’t remember the original. Just as Forrest Gump stole the introducing-your-character-into-historical-footage thing from Zelig, Memento used the same story-told-in-reverse-chronological-order thing from Harold Pinter’s Betrayal:
And yet someone tried.
What, you mean the Black & White Kansas/Color Oz gimmick? But that’s not a movie concept, and a remake of The Wizard of Oz could be done. After all, the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz was also a remake.
However, if I had the rights to the Oz books I wouldn’t bother remaking The Wizard of Oz, I’d jump straight to The Marvelous Land of Oz, and Ozma of Oz. But I wouldn’t mash them together as per “Return to Oz”, what would be the point of that?
Oh, and “The Land of Oz” has a
Gender Bending Twist Ending! <insert violin screeches here>
While the entire movie The Sixth Sense concept wasn’t remade (a boy see dead people), the premise and twist of having a main character along with the audience discover that they have been dead was done very effectively in The Others.