5 Movies That Actually Should Be Remade

Tom Howie

Feb 28, 2021

8 min read

Updated: Mar 16, 2021

We live in an era of Hollywood digging up films of the past and unnecessarily remaking them. The era has resulted in admittedly some great remakes: Ocean’s Eleven (1960 & 2001), The Departed (2002 & 2006) and Dredd (1995 & 2012). But for every great remake, there are three more bad remakes. For instance: did Hollywood need to remake Ben-Hur (1959 & 2016)? Simply put, no. The original won 11 Academy Awards and is an undisputed classic. Surprisingly, there are still some films hiding that have been strangely overlooked by Hollywood in their mad rush to reboot any film they can get their hands on.

Even though I am tired and frustrated about the multiple remakes that are released yearly, I admittedly have to say both classic and awful films would gain from a remake. There is no doubt that most if not all of the films below will one day get a remake. This list is to help push Hollywood studios and producers in the right direction by highlighting which films desperately need a remake. If any of these five films are remade in the next five years, then I would like royalties.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

The Breakfast Club is the tale of five teens, each from very different cliques and backgrounds within their high school, probably the best teen comedy John Hughes ever made, which is amazing when you look at the rest of Hughes' collection of work in the ’80s. They're forced to spend the day together in a Saturday detention session. While they appear to have virtually nothing in common when their ignorant principal is gone, they pour their hearts out to each other and unite in ways they never felt imaginable.

Still today, Hughes' original film holds a certain everlasting charm, but it would be very possible to make another brilliant movie, despite its legendary status. On the one hand, all the teens in the group are white, they all appear straight, opening the idea of creating something that everyone relates to. The movie doesn't have to be exclusively about identity politics, so it might be powerful to have a version of The Breakfast Club looking at the problems of other kinds of teens in a contemporary American high school.

Some key changes to the story will be made in the remake. This film can make a powerful statement to the older generation and give an insight into how it is growing up in the age of social media and the pressure that puts on teens. This film should dive into the pressure of being a black person in America in today's society, the pressure of not looking like the women and men you see on social media and anxious feelings about what happens when we grow up. Do we just figure it all out one day like some young people hope? This film has the potential to be a voice for a whole generation and to be an even bigger one than its predecessor.

Whom I would hire to Write, Director and Star in the film:

Genre

Comedy / Drama

Screenplay / Director

Original - John Hughes

Remake - Greta Gerwig (Little Women [2019], Lady Bird)

John Bender - The Criminal

Original - Judd Nelson

Remake - Ashton Sanders (Moonlight, The Retrieval, The Equalizer 2)

Allison Reynolds - The Basket Case

Original - Ally Sheedy

Remake - Alexa Demie (Waves, Mid90s, Euphoria)

Claire Standish - The Princess

Original - Molly Ringwald

Remake - Zendaya (Euphoria [Emmy Win], Spider-Man [2017 & 2019], Malcolm & Marie)

Brian Johnson - The Brain

Original - Anthony Michael Hall

Remake - Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart, Lady Bird, Bad Neighbours 2)

Andrew Clark - The Athlete

Original - Emilio Estevez

Remake - Nick Robinson (The Kings of Summer, A Teacher, Love, Simon)

Carl the Janitor

Original - John Kapelos

Remake - Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing [Oscar Win], Missouri, Vice, The Way Way Back)

Richard Vernon

Original - Paul Gleason

Remake - David Tennant (Jessica Jones, Doctor Who, Good Omens)

Last Action Hero (1993)

Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the biggest film stars of the 1980s and 1990s. When you get as big as he did, there's only one place to go—a parody. But only one film star has the charm and personality of Arnold Schwarzenegger and that is Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. Thus, The Last Action Hero was born. In the 1993 film, a young fan gets a golden ticket that puts him into his favourite film series, the fictional Jack Slater series, Schwarzenegger's largest in-universe franchise, his Terminator in this world.

A pre-teen boy running around an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie was supposed to work, but The Last Action Hero couldn't agree with itself on what kind of film it wanted to be. It wasn't entirely committed to becoming a parody, but it turned out to be yet another Arnold paint by numbers action film—but this time handcuffed to a PG-13 age rating. The way to fix this film and to bring it into the modern world is to keep the different genres in the film that they tried in the original but to have a better distinction between the genres rather than jumping around them in every other scene. The film can be a comedy, satire and drama all in one if done right.

Whom I would hire to Write, Director and Star in the film:

Screenplay

Original - Zak Penn & Adam Leff (Story) and Shane Black & David Arnott (Screenplay)

Remake - Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit [Oscar Win], What We Do in the Shadows)

Director

Original - John McTiernan

Remake - Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, Hunt for the Wilderpeople)

Jack Slater / Himself

Original - Arnold Schwarzenegger

Remake - Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Rush, Extraction)

Danny Madigan

Original - Austin O'Brien

Remake - Archie Yates (Jojo Rabbit)

Benedict

Original - Charles Dance

Remake - Nicholas Hoult (The Great, Mad Max: Fury Road, Warm Bodies)

Gotti (2018)

Oscar bait films are very high risk, high reward, but when they fail, they crash. For every film that reaps accolades, there is one that earns ridicule. A prime example of an Oscar-bait film crashing and burning is 2018’s atrocious Gotti, an utterly awful movie. Scoring a total of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and having a worldwide box office gross of just £6 million, failing to even earn more than the budget the film needed to be made.

So many things went wrong with this film. John Travolta, who has legitimately given great performances in the past, does not portray John Gotti as if he is performing a guest role on Saturday Night Live instead of playing as one of the most dangerous and powerful men in New York City's history. Travolta theatrically chewing on every syllable and emphasizing every scowl. Travolta chews on every syllable theatrically and showcases every grimace to a level of parody. It is not just Travolta’s poor performance that made Gotti one of the worst films in the last 20 years of cinema, the whole production is simply put, just bad. Some may argue, after two failures, that a movie based on the legendary leader of the Gambino crime family is never going to produce a good film. This is simply not true; the story of John Gotti is truly an oscar winner waiting in the wings. His life story has everything cinema-goers and critics love a rise in power, crime, heartbreak and a downfall. Maybe the best way to make a film about Gottiis not to have him as the lead, like Robert De Niro's Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987). A story that could be very interesting is how the FBI and Robert Mueller, U.S. The Assistant Attorney finally managed to convict the mob boss.

Whom I would hire to Write, Director and Star in the film:

Screenplay

Original - Leo Rossi & Lem Dobbs

Remake - Terence Winter (The Sopranos [Emmy Win], Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street)

Director

Original - Kevin Connolly

Remake - Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven [Oscar Win], Million Dollar Baby [Oscar Win], American Sniper)

Robert Mueller

Original - N/A

Remake - Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born, American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook)

John Gotti

Original - John Travolta

Remake - Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Milk, Inherent Vice)

Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano

Original - William DeMeo

Remake - Stephen Graham (The Irishman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, This Is England)

The Black Cauldron (1985)

In recent years, Disney has fallen back on remaking animated classics as live-action nostalgia trips to generate even more money for the company with the likes of The Lion King (2019), Aladdin (2019) and Beauty & The Beast (2017) all getting remakes. But, one day the Mouse House will run out of classics to remake and what will happen then? Build meaningless franchises, unnatural sequels like Beauty & The Beast IV? A possible path Disney should take is remaking films that did not work the first time but could very much work in modern cinema instead of sweeping their failures during the Magic Carpet. The film on top of that list? The Black Cauldron.

Admittedly, The Black Cauldron deserves a poor reputation. Well below the typical outstanding Disney quality that they normally produce, but not only did the film receive dreadful reviews from all but it made a mere £21 million at the box office worldwide. The film was such a failure that it almost put Disney Animation out of business. With the success of Netflix’s The Witcher (2019-) and the worldwide phenomenon Game of Thrones (2011-2019), a new genre of Medieval fantasy epic has been created. Disney must seize this opportunity to capitalize on this new genre. The perfect way for Disney to achieve this is to mix the extremely profitable remaking of their films and to join this new genre together, which means The Black Cauldron can be a successful film series at both the box office and critically for Disney, obviously if done right.

Whom I would hire to Write, Director and Star in the film:

Screenplay

Original - Nine people credited with Story & Two credited with additional dialogue & Seven credited with additional story contributions (I am just as shocked as you)

Remake - Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, The Hobbit Trilogy, Hellboy)

Director

Original - Ted Berman & Richard Rich

Remake - Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water [Oscar Win], Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim)

Taran

Original (voice actor) - Grant Bardsley

Remake - Paul Mescal (Normal People)

Eilonwy

Original (voice actor) - Susan Sheridan

Remake - Camila Morrone (Mickey and the Bear, Never Goin’ Back, Valley Girl)

The Horned King

Original (voice actor) - John Hurt

Remake (motion capture) - Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders, Batman Begins, Dunkirk)

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is generally considered as one of the great novels of the 20th century. A regular in English classrooms across the world, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Lee became a household name with this award-winning novel and a gold standard in the literary world. This is made even more remarkable as she did not publish another book for 55 years, a sequel to her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, or what is widely acknowledged as a retelling of the story from her first book but in the form of Lee’s first draft. Two years after the release of the book, it was adapted into an equally popular and successful film. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) also won the biggest prizes in its field, winning three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Art Direction.

The reason why this classic needs a modern-day remake is because, in over 50 years since the original, the story of a small-town lawyer's journey to defend a young black man in a rural community in Alabama is much more complicated than the original film portrays. The remake could even maybe become more ironic and powerful than the original. It has already been adapted for modern-day but Broadway by screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin. He changed aspects of the story to be more relatable to modern-day America to great success. Hopefully, To Kill a Mockingbird will appear on the silver screen again, with a bit more subtle courtesy of Sorkin's version.

Whom I would hire to Write, Director and Star in the film:

Screenplay

Original - Horton Foote

Remake - Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network [Oscar Win], The West Wing [Emmy Win], Moneyball)

Director

Original - Robert Mulligan

Remake - David Fincher (The Social Network, Seven, Mindhunter)

Atticus Finch

Original - Gregory Peck

Remake - Adam Driver (Marriage Story, BlacKkKlansman, Girls)

Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch

Original - Mary Badham