The first movie remake in history dates as far back as 1896, when Georges Méliès remade Louis Lumière‘s Playing Cards. Since then, it has become common practice for movie studios to take tried-and-true ideas and redo them for a new generation, whether it’s taking an international film and making a Hollywood version, taking a lackluster old film and attempting to improve upon it, or taking a classic and offering a modern version of its story.
Regardless, while many movie remakes throughout history have been successful, there have been many others which are nothing less than awful. From horror remakes like A Nightmare on Elm Street to action remakes like Rollerball, the worst of all time prove that it’s not always a great idea to rehash an older film. This is only counting remakes (retelling the same story from a previous movie), not reboots.
10
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (2010)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Wes Craven‘s 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the most foundational and hugely influential horror movies of the 20th century, breaking new ground in the slasher space with its supernatural surrealism and intensely psychological form of horror. In 2008, Michael Bay and his production company wanted to reboot the franchise with a remake of the original film. Enter Samuel Bayer‘s movie of the same name.
Where the original is one of the scariest horror movies of all time, this remake fundamentally misunderstands every last facet that made Craven’s masterpiece work as well as it did. The script strips away Freddy’s entire personality (solid of a job though Jackie Earle Haley does in the role), and the CGI-heavy dream sequences make for a film that’s heavy on the jump scares but painfully light on everything else.
9
‘Flatliners’ (2017)
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Image via Sony Pictures Releasing</figure>
Niels Arden Oplev‘s Flatliners is both a sequel to and a remake of Joel Schumacher‘s 1990 film of the same name. Critics didn’t love the original upon release, but it performed successfully at the box office and has since become a campy, neon-soaked cult classic. Its remake, on the other hand, has none of the Gothic stylishness needed to be considered anything less than an all-out failure.
Where the original Flatliners mostly just split critics’ opinions right down the middle, they found Oplev’s version of the story abhorrent, and for good reason. This is about as formulaic, dull, and predictable as sci-fi horror thrillers come, undermining an otherwise very talented cast (featuring the likes of Diego Luna and Elliot Page) with some of the worst writing they’ve ever had to work with.
8
‘Point Break’ (2015)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Kathryn Bigelow‘s Point Break is still widely remembered as one of the most endearing over-the-top cult classics of the ’90s, boosted by Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze at the top of their games. A script for a remake had been lying around Hollywood for years, but it wasn’t until 2015 that an American-German-Chinese remake finally came off the ground, directed by Ericson Core. To this day, fans still wish it never had.
It’s one of the absolute worst remakes of a beloved ’90s movie that the 21st century has thus far seen. The beating heart of the 1991 original is the complex, layered, famously homoerotic psychological chess match between our two protagonists. This new version, on the other hand, is low-energy, preachy, and emotionally flat to a fault. There’s no tension, no psychological nuance, and no neo-noir grit to speak of.
7
‘Dirty Dancing’ (2017)
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Image via ABC</figure>
The world of television movies is a medium that deserves infinitely more respect than it typically gets, but it’s undeniable that many of the absolute worst films of all time have been cast into the deepest pits of televisual hell. Case in point: Wayne Blair‘s Dirty Dancing, a remake of the 1987 Emile Ardolino romantic dance film that made Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey international superstars.
History has seen many a terrible remake of a classic movie, but rarely has it ever seen a remake this atrocious. Dirty Dancing‘s Abigail Breslin and Colt Prattes share absolutely zero chemistry, the musical numbers are bafflingly lifeless, the lip-syncing is painfully obvious, and the way the serious dramatic themes of the original were sanitized in order to appeal to television-watching families still feels like an affront to fans.
6
‘The Lion King’ (2019)
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Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures</figure>
Widely praised as Disney’s greatest animated film of all time, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff‘s 1994 classic The Lion King is just about as close as animated musicals for families can possibly come to perfection. However, with the House of Mouse’s obsession with live-action remakes of their animated classics in full swing throughout the 2010s, The Lion King fell victim to the craze with a photorealistic animated remake directed by Jon Favreau.
It’s remarkably close to being a shot-for-shot remake of the original; so, how could it be so bad? For one, the photorealistic animation not only strips any trace of expressiveness or emotion from the characters’ faces, it also adds a dimension of uncanny valley to the film that only works against it. What’s more, rarely has the last decade seen a clearer or more cynical cash-grab attempt at monetizing nostalgia.
5
‘Psycho’ (1998)
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Image via Universal Pictures</figure>
Alfred Hitchcock is still known as the Master of Suspense all these many years later, and that’s because no filmmaker in history has done more for the thriller genre. One of the only horror movies that Hitchcock ever directed was Psycho, far and away one of the greatest American films of the ’60s. It was Gus Van Sant who felt bold enough to try and do a shot-for-shot remake of one of the most foundational horror thrillers in film history.
In trying to change absolutely nothing about the skeleton of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Van Sant delivered such a lifeless, pointless, and stylistically hollow film.
Even remakes of movies as perfect as Psycho have been known to occasionally work in the past, but Van Sant’s Psycho is one of the worst horror remakes in film history. In trying to change absolutely nothing about the skeleton of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Van Sant delivered such a lifeless, pointless, and stylistically hollow film that it’s hard to think of it as anything other than the cinematic version of a bad karaoke performance.
Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath
your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what
it would leave behind.
Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you
to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever
won that particular argument.
- Freddy is horror’s cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot
guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever. - You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your
own head is where this does its damage. - These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose
because they are weak. They lose because they are tired. - You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.
Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the
person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.
- Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you
describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you. - You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You
know that feeling from real life too. - The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you
have met those adults. - By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.
Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost
certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.
- Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be
somebody who was at the party. - You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the
same way you watch films. - The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are
the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention. - Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.
Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people
asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.
- The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary
room that quietly stops feeling ordinary. - Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than
personal, which is rarer than it sounds. - This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are
the ones who are not alone and refuse to be. - Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one
standing in the hallway.
4
‘Oldboy’ (2013)
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Image via FilmDistrict</figure>
Based on Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi‘s Japanese manga Old Boy, Park Chan-wook‘s Oldboy is one of the greatest South Korean films of all time, a masterpiece about as foundational as modern action thrillers come. It was such a hit that it led to two adaptations. The 2006 unauthorized Hindi remake is bad enough, but it’s Spike Lee‘s official Hollywood remake that’s often labeled as one of the worst movies of the 2010s.
It is, indeed, far more concerned with being a remake of Park’s magnum opus than it is with offering a new adaptation of the manga; although, in fairness, it falls flat on its face in both departments. No one can deny that Lee’s an immensely talented filmmaker, but his Oldboy was subject to such draining studio interference (bringing his original 140-minute cut down to a measly 104 minutes) that it pales in comparison to the original in absolutely every way possible.
3
‘Rollerball’ (2002)
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Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures</figure>
Norman Jewison‘s 1975 dystopian sci-fi sports film Rollerball split critics at the time of its release, but it was a box office hit and became an almost instant cult classic, sparking a new wave of dystopian-themed sports movies. John McTiernan, one of the most legendary action filmmakers in modern Hollywood history, was the one behind the absolutely abysmal 2002 remake.
It’s easily one of the worst action movies of the 2000s, with some of the most incomprehensible editing and camerawork that the decade ever saw. It was also full of flat performances and confused creative choices, but its biggest sin was perhaps taking the story’s thought-provoking dystopian roots and throwing all of those interesting themes out the window in favor of a more traditional sports flick.
2
‘The Wicker Man’ (2006)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Nicolas Cage has starred in a handful of prominent feature film remakes over the course of his fascinating career, but the question of which one is the worst of the bunch isn’t really much of a question at all: It has to be Neil LaBute‘s The Wicker Man, a reimagining of the 1973 Robin Hardy British classic that completely revolutionized the folk horror genre.
Some have come to remember this as one of the most iconic so-bad-they’re-good movies of the 2000s, largely thanks to Cage’s hilariously over-the-top performance. Even aside from Cage, however, there’s plenty more to criticize here, from the complete lack of mystery or fear-inducing atmosphere to the hysterically awful third act and climax.
1
‘Swept Away’ (2002)
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Image via Sony Pictures Releasing</figure>
Guy Ritchie can be a bit of an acquired taste, but there are plenty of people who would be more than willing to defend him as an awfully underappreciated auteur. However, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone among those people who would go to bat for Swept Away, a remake of the Lina Wertmüller 1974 Italian rom-com of the same name.
Saying that this is one of the worst comedy remakes in history would perhaps be an understatement, seeing as it may very well be the single worst remake in film history. Where the original was a sharp satire on class struggle and fascism, this remake has zero sociopolitical subtext. Where the original had excellent performances, this remake has Madonna and Adriano Gianinni at their absolute worst. Where the original was razor-sharp in its humor and charming in tone, this remake has virtually no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
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