10 Movies You Won't Believe They Tried To Remake

2. Battle Royale

Kinji Fukusaku's Battle Royale was a gateway film into international cinema for many audiences of the early 2000s, and so by 2006 New Line Cinema were hard at work on an English-language remake.

But the brakes were suddenly pumped in April 2007 following the Virginia Tech shootings, as the producers sought to re-evaluate how an R-rated film about schoolchildren killing one another could still be made.

The remake faced another huge setback when an adaptation of Suzanne Collins' similarly-themed novel The Hunger Games began shooting in 2011, after which it became a pop-culture phenomenon in its own right.

After this, remake producer Roy Lee finally admitted defeat, that a Battle Royale remake would now be dismissed by audiences as a Hunger Games ripoff. Lee did suggest he might return to the idea a decade later, but to date he quite thankfully hasn't.

The original Battle Royale is such a perfect organism of a movie, and in the risk-averse, excessively squeamish studio climate of 2024, a Hollywood remake would almost certainly be a sanitised disaster.