13 Announced Movie Remakes Which Could Be Awesome

Not all remakes are created equal.

By Jack Pooley /

TriStar Pictures

While Hollywood's obsession with remaking classic movies is an undeniable sign of creative stagnation, laziness and general cynicism among studio executives, it's also fair to say that not all remakes are created equal.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ocean’s Eleven. The Fly. The Thing. A Star Is Born. Ben-Hur. True Grit. These are just a few of the many great Hollywood remakes, which with an appropriately compelling directorial vision, fresh new narrative take and top-notch cast, defied all expectations of what remakes could be.

But still, nobody's really looking forward to the planned upcoming remakes of, say, Memento, Jacob's Ladder or Escape From New York, to say nothing of the literally hundreds of in-the-works remakes dispassionately shilling old ideas to a new generation.

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Yet in the case of these 13 remakes, mostly of cult movies, there's the genuine feeling that a contemporary update could bring a different and equally valid (if not more so) flavour to the table.

Note that we've deliberately disqualified Disney's live-action remakes from this list, because that honestly just feels a bit like cheating. These projects, meanwhile, are a good deal riskier and tackle material that won't be sold to the masses quite so easily. But if they get it right, many of them could be bigger and better than the originals ever were...

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