10 Movie Remakes Nobody Expected Or Wanted

There might not be any film more “1980s” than the original Red Dawn. The story of a group of high-school teens heroically defending their small, middle-American town from invading Russians during World War III (a war kicked off by environmentalists convincing Germany to ditch its nuclear weapons no less), John Millius' film captures so much about the era that it’s practically a time-capsule.

So when MGM decided to have another go at it in the late 2000s, there were likely a few heads being scratched. The idea of Soviet troops parachuting into small-town USA was already stretching reality when the original was made, and was the sort of nonsense you could only get away with in the glorious days of eighties action cinema. Transplant that into a post-Cold War world, and the idea of any country having both the justification and the resources to launch a full-scale land invasion of the USA becomes laughable.

This is a problem the filmmakers soon ran into themselves when they realised that China (their original USSR replacement) was actually on comparatively good terms with the US in 2010, and would not appreciate their portrayal - to say nothing of the diminished box office receipts that would come from ditching the Chinese box office. To fix this, they replaced China in post-production with the second biggest baddie they could think of - North Korea, a country that, although in possession of a sizeable military, would not have the logistical capabilities of invading the United States.

Red Dawn just isn’t the sort of plot that made much sense in the 2010s, which explains why it failed on both a critical and commercial level.