There were two tellings of “The Blob”. Never saw the Steve McQueen one, but I was entertained by the second.
I’ve got an entire book devoted to remakes, entitled Make it Again, Sam. And it’s not at all an exhaustive report. Hollywood is addicted to remakes, for some reason. Sometimes directors (Cecil B. DeMille with The Ten Commandments or Hitchcock with The Man Who Knew Too Much ) wants to re-do a film. Sometimes they get the same actor to redo a role in essentially the same movie(Clark Gable in Mogambo and Red Dust; Sean Connery in Thunderball and Never Say Never Again). But most of the time they just want to do a remake on the theory that it was a success in the past, and might be again. Sometimes it’s still not clear to me why the remake was necessary. Why did Disney redo The Ansent-Minded Professor? I understand the Robin Williams remake with the CGI effects (Flubber), but why the little-lauded Harry Anderson remake that preceded it? Why remake an awful B-grade monster movie as a Z-grade one with even lower budget? (The She Creature remade as Creature of Destruction; It Conquered the World remade as Zontar the Thing from Venus I could go on …) Why remake D.O.A. a half a dozen times? Why, in God’s name, remake Psycho, or Day of the Jackal, when Hitchcock and Zinneman got it right?