8 Movies That Were Secretly Remakes Of Remakes

8. Ben-Hur

Ben Hur.jpg
MGM/Paramount Pictures

The Original: Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (1925)

The Remake: Ben-Hur (1959)

The Remake Remake: Ben-Hur (2016)

Sometimes a remake can be so overwhelmingly successful that the original will get lost in the cultural soup. And I'm not meaning Reservoir Dogs or The Departed, where revealing they're based on foreign movies is a fact used only by movie fans with shocking trivia chops - I'm talking about the films so immortalised they make for a shocking inclusion on a list like this.

Take Ben-Hur, which - while being based on a famed 1900s book - was pretty much a remake of a 1925 silent film, A Tale Of The Christ. That's not to say the original original is a nothing film - it's a pretty important landmark actually, essential in making MGM a major cinematic player - just that the William Wyler Oscar-winner was even more epic and societally seismic.

The remake of the remake last year only succeeded in creating a desire to rewatch the 1959 version.

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Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.