How many remakes have ever actually lived up to or surpassed the original?
About 45 mins ago, I read that a live-action Hollywood adaptation of Akira has been in the works for more than 20 years, and it was apparently about to move forward.
About 30 mins ago, I read that the rights have lapsed so it's pretty much dead in the water. However, it looks like there was always skepticism for an American version, long before anyone thought to put Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell.
About 15 mins ago, I learned that Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is about to be released this weekend. It's apparently a "reinterpretation" of Kurosawa's High and Low, which I've been meaning to watch but never looked up the trailer to until 10 mins ago. That made me think about how inherent Japanese-ness might be to Kurosawa's work - the pacing, the emotional tension bubbling under the surface, the unspoken contexts - and how much of that is translatable or indeed replaceable. (Also it made me compare the track records of the Akira Kurosawa+Tohiro Mifune combo to Spike Lee+Denzel Washington)
All of that made me arrive at this question - how many worthwhile remakes have there ever really been, whether or not they crossed cultures? I suspect the ratio of bad/mediocre to good/great is weighted heavily to the former. I know of a few famous examples (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars) but I'm counting on you film buffs to broaden my horizons here.
For the purpose of this thread, I want to exclude movies that are second-attempt adaptations of a previously existing IP (e.g. Dune 2021 vs. Dune 1984), unless you feel it specifically aimed to be a remake of the first movie.
I suppose this gets rid of West Side Story (2021) since I think that’s better than the original.
The two more obvious ones are both John Carpenter films. The Fly and The Thing. I think The Thing From Another World is generally well regarded but the original version of The Fly is a cheesy b-movie from the 50s. Both of Carpenter’s films are far and away better than their originals and The Thing gets placed on greatest films of all time lists frequently.
Ocean’s 11 with Brad Pitt and George Clooney is a much better film than the version with the RatPack which is mostly old alcoholics in suits making phone calls in rooms. The Sinatra/Martin film is such a drag compared to Soderbergh’s energetic comedy.
A Star is Born (2018) is the definitive version of the story. This is an interesting one because it’s technically a franchise with how many films there are. The original one from the 30s is solid, the Judy Garland version is bloated and overindulgent with lame musical numbers, the Streisand version I think is better than the previous two, but Gaga blows them all out of the water. It finds the balance between melodrama and music that the previous films couldn’t figure out. With actual fantastic music (thanks to Gaga). It cuts through their bloated runtimes and frankly Cooper and Gaga give the best performances of all the renditions. It feels epic and beautiful in a way the others don’t. Like a liberal Clint Eastwood film.
The Fly was directed by Cronenberg. Tho i agree would add Invasion of the body snatchers to the list
Damn it. I always confuse those two
The Thing is technically a second (more faithful?) adaptation of Who_Goes_There . But I suspect thats going to be the case for a lot of the fun ones. I say we rebel against OP and include those too!
I just recently caught A Star is Born(2018) and really liked it. I was wondering if any of the older ones would be worth watching...
On a similar note to The Fly and The Thing, the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers certainly holds up to the 50s original (although they're both very good, so saying it's better is more difficult).
Maybe the secret is young Jeff Goldblum.
They didn't hold much to the original but technically The Mummy (1999) is a remake. That one is undeniably better than the OG.
Then we go full circle with the Tom Cruise reboot that was pretty not good.
Do we count series? Battlestar Galactica, obviously. Also Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood was way better than the first attempt.
I totally disagree on FMA. And I think Brotherhood is a far worse series when the original hasn't been watched first. So many of the early impactful scenes are glossed over in FMA:B that I think you're only getting a half-experience.
FMA:B is incredible, and absolutely takes the show in a far better direction. But the original show has a lot to offer, and shouldn't be dismissed - even if the ending is weird and it's an unfaithful adaptation of the source on its own.
Agreed. One actually finished, which nets it more points. But the pacing of the first before the deviation is still superior. I will always recommend watch order of first series up to a point and then switching.
Where would this split be? I watched the original several years ago, and now my wife was wanting to try FMA so we were just going to watch brotherhood begining to end. If there's a clear time to swap between the two that sounds like the better option.
This is just my personal preference that the original takes a few more breaths for heavier moments. Modern audiences might prefer faster pacing, and FMA:B is also much more canonical.
If you only have time to watch one, watch the original till episode 7 or 8, then hop off and watch FMA:B from beginning to end. But if you have the time to do the original, stop after episode 25, and then restart FMA:B from the first episode.
The original run of FMA is a lot shorter than Brotherhood. I think it is very much worth your time to watch both. They start to diverge after ~16 episodes of FMA/~6 episodes of FMA:B. There isn't really an ideal point to "switch over" and maintain a consistent narrative. The writers of FMA had future plans from Hiromu Arakawa to work with when they ran out of manga to adapt, so the stories change but do not fully diverge until the Fifth Laboratory.
I think FMA in general gets over-hated. The whole run was widely considered top-tier anime before Brotherhood came out. I think there are a lot of things the latter half of FMA does better than FMA:B, particularly with how its characters are further developed, the political commentary surrounding the Furher and his government, and is generally better paced.
I watched the first 10 episodes of FMA 03 and then switched to Brotherhood. I feel like I got the best of both worlds.
The first FMA anime was such a magical experience for me. I know this makes the internet crazy but I refuse to watch a better version of largely the same story. I am simply not that dedicated to anime and 64 episodes is a lot to an adult.
It's not like you missed anything. You still watched an incredible story.
I'm with you, I don't need to watch a second run of the show. I'm not that invested.
It's like going to the same vacation spot twice. There's so much more to see in the world.
As someone who read the manga and watched both shows, I like the original anime better. The manga has way too many characters and drags things out too as these things tend to. The only thing that I really would miss from the longer series is Major General Olivier Mira Armstrong.
The original FMA only follows the manga for the first half or so. If I remember right, Brotherhood only overlaps the original in a few of the early episodes, then fairly quickly diverges to more closely follow the manga instead.
If we're looking at series, The Office has to be up there too. Took it from a one off, pretty good British comedy that ran for one season into an absolute cultural phenomenon with real emotional stakes.
Ehh... I got a few chuckles out of the UK version. I've never found anything funny in the US version, though I am sympathetic to the Jim/Pam pairing. I don't know that I've ever liked a US version of a British comedy though.
It's midnight so I'm not going to type up my whole rant but I think FMA 2003 is much better than FMA:B. Highlights include: fewer distracting Anime visual tropes, better characterization for Winry, not having the entire Xing subplot drag focus from the central conflicts, a more interesting take on Homonculi as a sort of punishment for Man's hubris, and a cleaner arc for Scar.
Blade Runner 2049 isn't a remake at all, but for some reason it was sort of treated that way by the media, so maybe it sort of fits.
The original Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies of all time, but 2049 is just... better.
The new one has an actual plot. The original has amazing cinematography, set design, score, acting, and so on, but the plot is literally just "Guy is tasked to kill 4 replicants. He does". There's nothing particularly interesting about the actual things that happen in the movie. The interesting part is the moral quandary of it all, empathizing with the characters Deckard is hunting and so forth.
2049 has a mystery to solve. K is stuck in a constant back and forth of whether he's "special" or "real" or not. People are betrayed, things take unexpected turns, and the bare plot of the film is interesting, even if you just wrote it down. It also still has great cinematography, acting, set design, mood, and so on that the first one had.
They're both classics in my opinion, but 2049 is a better movie, both from a technical standpoint and a pure enjoyment standpoint.
I first read the source book ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") as an adult, then watched some version of the original film and 2049. I therefore have zero nostalgia blinders, but I did like the book and 2049. The first film is really hammy and I'm not a huge fan of Harrison Ford, and I thought his character in the film was a way bigger douche than his equivalent in the book, who was much more circumspect. (I imagine the film was really incredible when it came out, though, and probably explains at least some of my disconnect with it.)
That's interesting. I saw Blade Runner first, and I really don't like the book much, but love 2049. The thing about the first Blade Runner is that it single handedly created the aesthetic we know as cyberpunk. Yes, the genre existed before Blade Runner, but mostly in literature form. The vision that Blade Runner put on the screen; the streets filled with japanese ads, the dirty flying cars, the rain, the neon, all the stuff we think of as quintessentially cyberpunk, and which has been endlessly reused in other movies, games, novels, and art was created by Syd Mead, Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott for that movie. Because of that, even though as I mentioned the plot isn't very interesting, the mood of the movie is just out of this world.
I actually wasn't a huge fan either the first time I saw it, but every time I watched it I started liking it, then loving it more and more to the point that it became my all time favorite.
It may be worth a rewatch if you ever get the time.
Thanks for the summary! It's for those reasons that I think my Blade Runner ship has sailed, unfortunately - while I can appreciate intellectually that it was the progenitor of a lot of great art later on, I've already consumed a lot of that art, and I'm not a big enough movie nerd (or fan) to slog through it repeatedly to feel something. I probably appreciate sci fi writing a bit more, and because I read the book first, to me it's the "definitive" telling of that story. (Meanwhile, I watched Total Recall first and think it's a more enjoyable story compared to the short story - I guess I'm just a delightful and inconsistent curmudgeon...)
Would we count 12 Angry Men by your criteria? It was originally performed live on TV and was well-received. Three years later, they made it into one of the greatest movies of all time.
I was going to suggest the same. It's hard to imagine how the original could have been better — but I didn't see it, so maybe it was.
Of course Wikipedia would have a big list of film remakes A-M and N-Z
A few ones I spotted while skimming where the remake was good:
I will die on the hill that the 2003 version of the Italian Job is just one big film of Marky Mark shitting all over the original. The '69 version is a fun, campy master piece. 2003 is a slog. But agree to disagree :)
I'll admit, I was in my teens when it came out and I saw it in theater, so there's certainly a good chance I wouldn't find it as cool now. All I know is that I wanted a Mini so badly for a very long time after that, though never did get one.
I get that, I wanted the mini so badly when they came out with the retro model. I even got my mom to let me come with her to test drive one.
The Italian Job came out on PS1 prior to the Marky Mark version so maybe that's why I've always had a penchant for the 60s Mini...
Ehhh, as a native Hong Konger, I will maintain that the Departed is a very good localization effort, but does not improve upon the original Infernal Affairs. To me, it loses a lot of nuances.
I would say that Infernal Affairs is strictly a better movie than The Departed. But it's also maybe worth mentioning that I think that Scorsese is perhaps the single most overrated director of all time, so my opinion on that matter is probably questionable.
Spicy take :)
I don't know too much about the Boston Mafia culture, so I can't comment on if Scorsese's has as much depth, tension and intensity as Infernal Affairs.
I should try to clarify that I don't think he's a bad director at all, but a lot of people seem to consider him one of the all-time greats. I find his movies tend to be stolid, good enough movies, but I don't usually leave them and take anything out of having watched them.
Totally agreed - I just can't be bothered to watch another all-dude cast of despicable criminals.
We could probably get a semblance of an empirical answer using this list. We could parse the list, look up the score for the movie vs the remake on imdb, and see how many remakes outperform their source material. Since the movies in the list are very accurate and include the year, it should be relatively easy to look up info on them. @tomf I believe has a script that could be of use? Any interest in whipping that out and getting some data analysis going?
I’ve actually just been working on a tool and using the IMDB Non-Commercial Datasets, enabling me to do exactly that. It’s building graphs on top of Kuzu DB (for fun lol). I’m not quite ready to share but will do so soon. I mainly need to swap to bulk loading the data since there are tens of millions of nodes and edges and the load takes too long. Anyhow, the datasets are here if you want to poke at them yourself.
https://developer.imdb.com/non-commercial-datasets/
Sounds great! I've actually delved into parsing movie data before, but happened to know that tomf has also done so and is less lazy than me; he actually did the analysis below and found that 81% of originals are better than remakes, based on the ratings on omdb and tmdb, both of which I believe are easier to deal with than imdb, even their non-commercial datasets.
Off the top of my head, Little Shop of Horrors should countm It started as a film, then got adapted as a musical for stage theater, and then that got re-adapted back to film.
Meanwhile The Ring is considered one of the best American remakes and kicked off the whole trend of American remakes of foreign horror films. (And yes, it's based on a novel, but the American film is based on the Japanese film.) Also in the horror vein, more recently the American version of Speak no Evil has a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes than the original.
I don't think Little Shop of Horrors should count, because it's a new adaptation of something else, even though the "something else" is an adaptation of a movie. From what I can tell, the musical film doesn't really take much inspiration from the Corman film except for what comes through from the musical. But I can't say for sure because I haven't actually seen the stage musical.
Moving away from Hollywood, a remake that I thought was done well and lived up to the original is the 2012 Tamil movie Nanban. It's a shot-for-shot remake of the 2009 Hindi movie 3 Idiots. Both are coming-of-age Indian comedy-dramas and while they share the same basic story, they're both adapted for their respective audiences and have their own charm and impact. They both adapt place names, cultural references, dialogue with slang, the comedy, the romance, basically everything for their respective audiences and they both do an amazing job with it. I personally preferred Nanban since I come from a Tamil family and relate to it and its comedy more but both are great movies.
Man, I didn't even consider any of the remakes in Indian and Southeast Asian cinema. Good to hear there are contenders with a bit more integrity than just the quick knockoffs of Hollywood movies.
Yeah I figured the focus would be on Hollywood so I thought Id march to my own beat here haha! India's film industry as a whole is massive and produces more movies than Hollywood does. A good chunk of remakes you'd find are pretty lazy in my opinion but there are a few gems around.
This is fascinating. I'd never heard of Nanban despite being a die-hard fan of 3 Idiots and considering it one of my top favorite movies (and having recommended it to many people). I'd be intrigued to give Nanban a shot. However, I am not from India and am wholly unfamiliar with Hindi or Tamil culture, so none of your points in favor of the remake apply to me. Therefore, I suspect that a shot-by-shot remake will seem to me like essentially the same movie just with different actors than the ones I've come to love in those roles.
Yeah I think in your case it might not be worth a watch. In my opinion Nanban does do the comedy better than 3 Idiots, but 3 Idiots does the emotional scenes better than Nanban. Besides that, the only differences I can remember is that Nanban has one extra song stuffed into it compared to 3 Idiots so it won't feel meaningfully different.
There's even a Mexican remake called Tres Idiotas.
Every film I was going to say has already been mentioned, except True Grit.
I'm not even a fan of westerns, but after watching the original, the remake is infinitely better, yet hits all the same beats. It's a true homage to the original movie and book, yet does it so much better. Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld give fantastic performances.
I guess when we're on the subject of westerns, I haven't actually watched the original but I understand the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma is better than the original as well.
I normally post general hate for all reboots, but John Wayne movies are just so dated in several ways I can't see a more contemporary attempt not being better.
Remakes are a bit of a minefield. The people making it are trapped by the original film in some ways; everything they do will be compared to the original. If you try to make it too much like the original, then you will disappoint the people who want new things; if you try to make it too different, you will piss off the people who loved the original. I can't help think of the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, which was a nearly shot-by-shot remake of the original and won two Golden Raspberries for it's efforts.
But they're not entirely unwelcome either. People still go and see these movies; they certainly don't hate them by default. Personally, I'm happy to go see them if they're significantly different enough. One of the cool things about going to see Shakespere productions is that they almost always come up with new interpretations of the characters and settings, even if they are still using the same script verbatim.
(On that note I wonder if Romeo + Juliet counts as a remake in this context...)
I actually think that the Scarlett Johansson GitS movie wasn't terrible. It was a pretty competently put together film. It's just that it was sitting in the shadow of Goliath; the chances of it escaping that shadow was basically nil. I'm kind of glad that the Akira movie didn't get made for much the same reason. I'd rather see it as a series rather than a movie; something that could be expanded upon with the parts of the manga that didn't make it into the movie, with all the more political parts of it intact.
I'll also say that I'm kind of into the new Netflix Western Live Action Anime Adaptation trend. I don't care about One Piece, which is the darling of these shows, but each of those productions have this out of touch with reality vibe to them which makes me love them the same way you'd love a particularly stupid dog.
Came here to shout out live Shakespeare productions.
This summer, I saw an 80s themed Two Gentleman Of Verona, and it was fantastic. They kept the dialogue but adding a ton of references. Trailer should be fun for folks who remember the 80s fondly. But the best part is that they improved upon the Bard's ending: the women run away with the bandits (who reveal themselves to be all women + 1 obviously man shaped actor who outsts himself as "ally") instead of returning to Verona with the Duke and the rest of the Dude Bros.
A new anime series adaptation of Akira was announced a while back (Japanese link) but I haven't heard anything about it since.
This is beside the actual question that you pose in this topic, but I just wanted to note that Kurosawa is actually typically seen as the least Japanese of the major directors of the golden age of Japanese cinema. To the point where Japanese media often called him sekai no Kurosawa, or "Kurosawa of the world", denoting his international status, and often doing it with a pejorative intent. While Kurosawa himself tended to say that his primary audience was always Japanese youth, he did have more success internationally than any other Japanese filmmaker, and for both Japanese and foreign critics, his works have typically felt less Japanese than those of contemporaries like Ozu, Naruse, Mizoguchi, Kobayashi and Inagaki.
And when watching his works it is certainly not difficult to notice that Kurosawa was influenced by American, European and Soviet cinema, art and literature. High and Low is a fairly good example, being a loose adaptation of the American author Evan Hunter's police procedural novel King's Ransom. Some critics have also drawn connections with Dante's Divine Comedy (the Japanese title of the film literally translates as Heaven and Hell), and both the visual style and rhythm of the film could be argued to be closer to Hollywood than Tokyo. Although for me, the film's most sublimely directed scenes (roughly the first third of the film) always scream more "Greek drama" than anything else. If you ask me, High and Low is one of the most beautifully choreographed films ever made.
These non-Japanese influences don't automatically make Kurosawa pro-western or anti-Japanese, of course. Again, High and Low is a good example: the film can be read as something of a critical look at the internationalisation of Japan, raising questions about the American-led capitalist system that was being built at the time in the country.
I love High and Low and it's usually my default recommendation when someone asks what Kurosawa film they should watch first. I'm also really looking forward to seeing Spike Lee's version of the story. This is sort of his second Kurosawa adaptation, as his debut film She's Gotta Have It was strongly influenced by Kurosawa's Rashomon. Lee's new film is also not the only recent adaptation of High and Low: Steven Soderbergh's 2023 television series Full Circle also uses it as a loose starting point, although takes the story and its social commentary in a fairly different direction. Over a quarter of a century since his death, Kurosawa seems to remain at least somewhat relevant to modern audiences and filmmakers.
Well, that's interesting to note. I knew that Kurosawa did draw on foreign cinema and literature but I maybe can't tell how much that distinguished his style from his countrymen.
Wow, really? I've probably seen She's Gotta Have It too long ago to remember clearly, but I wouldn't have related those two at all.
Well, me calling it an "adaptation" is pushing it quite a bit. But like Rashomon, She's Gotta Have It features characters talking to the camera and giving subjective, contradictory, and likely unreliable accounts of their experience. Lee has often talked about the influence of Kurosawa's film in connection with his debut work.
what a mess. Anyway, check this sheet for ratings and breakdowns and an overall pivot to show if the sequel was better or not.
Some titles didn't pull through, but I got most of them.
tldr; 81.37% of originals are higher rated than the sequels.
cc/ @aphoenix
Science!
Thanks, that's awesome.
It's much higher than I expected, though I wonder if part of that is because of modern expectations for older movies, or Anglo-centric ratings.I originally read it completely backwards. It's actually about what I expected.Cool stuff! Thanks for pulling that together
the english and most asian films were a breeze, but the others were terrible. I only did about twenty manually. This is a combination of omdb and tmdb.
I loved the 2018 Suspiria remake. I like the original but enjoy the remake much more.
...i haven't seen it since its original theatrical run, but philip kaufman's 1978 invasion of the body snatchers quite impressed me and is frequently lauded as one of the greatest remakes of all time...
The original 50s film is still solid to be fair, but the 70s version is a phenomenal remake.
As an early teen I really enjoyed Robocop, Total Recall and Judge Dredd. I’m not sure how critically acclaimed the originals were, but I really liked them being a hyped up kid. The remakes weren’t bad at all, or maybe that’s just looking through my ‘90s tinted glasses.
Was the ending of the original Total Recall different? There was something about the old version I liked better, and it wasn’t just Schwarzenegger.
Judge Dredd was a straight up bad movie. I wouldn't say that Dredd is really a remake though, just a different story told about the same character from the same source material. Man, it's a wayyyy better movie than Judge Dredd was though.
I think the Total Recall remake left the ending less ambiguous but that's going off what others said... I couldn't finish the remake.
Oh, haha, so it was that bad… my clouded view really helped the movie, then!
Total Recall is technically an adaption of Phillip K Dick's We Can Remember For You Wholesale, so it doesn't count within OP's parameters.
I've never seen the original 21 Jump Street, but I really super love Phil Lord and Chris Miller's 21 and 22. Folks who've watched the original, care to comment?
The original was a TV show, so it's really an adaptation and not a remake.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a remake of Bedtime Story, and while the original is good, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favourite comedies of all time.
I will second @myrrh and say that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is fantastic and just works better than the 1956 film of the same name. Donald Sutherland is at his best, and Veronica Cartwright is awesome.
If we allow movies that remake old shows, then arguments could be made for Mission Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. They're both pretty good remakes.
Scarface (1983) is often not even known as a remake, but it is a remake of the 1932 film of the same name. I'm actually up in the air about if the 1983 film is better than the 1932 film, but it's certainly more modern (despite being over 40 years old) and probably more watchable for modern sensibilities. The original is pretty great, but I haven't watched it since the mid 90s and I was a pretty hoity toity movie watcher at the time.
The remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E is so, so freaking good. Man, why did Armie Hammer have to go do all that weird shit?!? I still think that's a perfect spy movie. Lots of action, a little camp, and a soundtrack for the ages.
True Lies is a competent blockbuster and certainly amps up the action part (I mean, the Harrier?) while La Totale goes more into comedy. It also helps that Thierry Lhermitte is known to play ordinary men (or at best attractive men, but he's no Vandamme) while Schwarzenegger... is Schwarzenegger, so the setup that the protagonist is a James bond type spy hits harder with La Totale.
Silence (2016) is pretty good. The 1971 version has its charms but the remake is definitely more accessible and better pacing. I would say it lived up to the original on average. Some parts were significantly better while the ending feels a bit weird. I never read the original novel so I'm not sure which is more true-to-the-book but they are definitely different feeling endings.
This is an odd one, but the Broderick+Lane+Thurman+Farrell version of the Producers is pretty great, and that's several layers of remake-deep...
Nah. Better production values, but for some reason the director decided to make it so true to the stage that she left in the pauses for audience laughter. The pacing is incredibly awkward as a result.
Only one I can think of. Battlestar Galactica.
1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is vastly superior to the version from 1956 as well as the book from 1945.
If you count all the remakes that no one remembers are remakes, there's probably quite a lot.
Like I've never seen the 60s Oceans 11, but I've also never heard someone say it's better than the more recent one.
I hope I am remembering correctly, but I think the first remake of Night of the Living Dead (assuming that's the right one that I'm thinking of) was a lot better than the original. It improved pretty much everything that was poor with the original film. Mainly the female lead being a useless obnoxious character that does nothing vs a meaningful addition to the dynamic and the super depressing and fucked up ending into a more standard ending.
I should probably rewatch them to see if my opinion has changed at all, but when I watched them originally (must have been 10-15 years ago now) I felt pretty strongly that this was the case.
I enjoyed the Lindsey Lohan version of The Parent Trap, I'll have to watch the original to compare.
The original Parent Trap was interesting, but I didn't like it as much.
Fun fact, Aunt Vicki in this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqT5e4JBaU4 is the same actress (and possibly the same character) from the first Parent Trap who was engaged to the dad, but got dumped in favor of remarrying the mother. That sort of makes Lindsey Lohan's Parent Trap a sequel.
Speaking of Lindsay Lohan, I once watched the two versions of Freaky Friday back to back at a sleepover in highschool -- I don't really remember which I liked better at the time, but I do remember enjoying the Jodie Foster version to a similar degree as the Lindsay Lohan one!
Some remakes that were completely different and I believe possibly better than the original:
Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams (as much as I hate him, he has musical talents)
Cake - I will Survive
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Snake River Conspiracy - Lovesong
Kind of surprised no one mentioned music...
The Equalizer and Man on Fire -- I saw these remakes first, but generally liked them more.
Haven't seen anyone mention Sorcerer (1977). It’s a remake of the French classic The Wages of Fear. Same nail-biting tension, but totally its own vibe. Bombed on release thanks in part to Star Wars coming out the same week, but it’s aged into a masterpiece. Quentin Tarantino has said it's one of the greatest movies ever made.
I'd say the Wicked musical (and movie) are both more successful than the book. Not sure if that counts in these parameters but that's what I could think of