Hollywood has an unhealthy addiction to remakes, and it could very well be the death of them. The big studios didn't used to be quite so brazen in their endless recycling of old ideas and expansions of lucrative franchises, mind. Nowadays we're used to, say, the news that King Kong is going to be remade for a fourth time, not five years after Peter Jackson helmed his own three-hour epic rendition of the big dumb monkey film. What's the point in hiding it? They know people will go and see it. Audiences are loyal to their brands, characters, and recognisable trademarks. It was a long time before tinsel town realised people were so receptive to obvious redos of previous movies, however. They used to try and hide it. They used to go to great lengths to conceal their remakes, back in the day. Actually, there's even some recent examples of films which were blatantly exactly the same as existing movies - same characters, same premise, same plot - but which Hollywood tried to dress up as something else. They'll shift the setting to somewhere different, switch up the cast, even change things over to a completely different genre. And we're not just talking, like, Jumanji the animal-based magical board game becoming Zathura, the space-based magical board game. We mean real, honest-to-goodness stealth recyclings of old ideas dressed up as something wholly new. Films you won't believe they got away with pretending they were original or unique. Films that are either respectful homages, total rip-offs or weirdly similar, depending on your point of view. There are ten films that were secretly remade.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
