Kurosawa’s Yojimbo has been remade twice to my knowledge, once as Per un pugno di dollari (a.k.a. A Fistful of Dollars) with Clint Eastwood, and more recently as Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis.
Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, on the other hand, has been remade at least three times as far as I am aware: once as a western (The Magnificent Seven), once as science fiction (Battle Beyond the Stars), and once as a comedy (The Three Amigos).
Can anybody think of other films that have been remade at least twice? And can any movie top Seven Samurai for most remakes?
A Christmas Carol. The IMDB lists 12 film adaptations and 27 TV adapatations, and that’s just searching on the name – there are versions that aren’t called “A Christmas Carol.”
There are also dozens of adaptations of Frankenstein
annaplurabelle: Again, sequels and adaptations from books don’t count.
There have actually been 25 Godzilla movies to date (with another on the way), but none of them were remakes of the original. You’ll have to trust me on this one, since I’ve actually watched each and every one.
As for Cinderella, I beileve that they are all adaptations of the original novel and not simply remakes of the Disney version.
I’m talking about films that have the same basic plot and characters as earlier films (usually with a completely different name), but that are not just adapting the same source material as the first movie.
Hmmmm… Well, I obviously didn’t know that Yojimbo was an “uncredited film version” of a novel by Dashiell Hammett. Still, I think it’s pretty obvious (to me, at least ;)) that the later films were remakes of Yojimbo and not of the source novel. Although, to be honest, I suppose one could take that argument a step further and claim that Battle Beyond the Stars and Last Man Standing were therefore remakes of The Magnificent Seven if you don’t credit the filmmakers with having seen Yojimbo.
sigh
Maybe I should say that this doesn’t include films that are adaptations of well known books or plays. What I’m looking for are movies where the filmmakers saw a previous movie and said “Gee – I want to remake that film,” NOT where the filmmakers said, “I really liked that book/play and want to do my own adaptation of it.” Come on, people – this shouldn’t be that hard, should it?
I’m not sure about this, but I’m assuming that it would be either more difficult or more costly to secure the rights to remake an original screenplay - as opposed to adapting a literary work which has entered public domain (which of course explains why so many Hamlets, Christmas Carols, Romeo and Juliets, and even Cinderella, no?).
But thanks for asking - now I’m driving myself and co-workers crazy trying to think of an example…
I recall a listing of all the versions of Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde in the magazine “Famous Monsters of Filmland” back in the 1960s. There were a lot of them, including many with different titles (like Der Januskopf). The IMDB doesn’t conveniently list them all. Looking through their lists, I find about 20 or so versions which are all based directly on the Stevenson novel (and not weird variations like “Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again!” or “Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde” or “Abbott and Costello mett…”), and I don’t think that’s at all exhaustive. I think J&H is in the running.
The Godzilla films are emphatically not “versions”. And I dispute that there are “dozens” of versions of Frankenstein. There are now quite a few versions of Shelley’s original novel, but I doubt if there is even a single dozen of them.
The Front Page was adapted from a play in 1931, and I’m pretty sure the numerous remakes (under that title, or His Girl Friday or Switching Channels) were inspired by that film (or each other) instead of the original play.
I count at least six versions of the film after the original.
It should be mentioned that two of those adaptations of The Front Page were live television productions from the 1940s.
Now, following the rules of this thread, we are excluding movies based on previously published literary works, e.g., novels, plays, stories, comics. We are looking for movies based only on previous movies. My educated guess is that, among English-language features, the winner is the 1954 and 1976 remakes of A Star Is Born (1937), which was officially an original screenplay (William A. Wellman and
Robert Carson won Oscars in the “Original Story” category), although it borrowed some plot elements from What Price Hollywood? (1932).