10 Movie Remakes Nobody Expected Or Wanted

2011’s The Thing isn’t technically a remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror masterpiece. It's actually a prequel, depicting what happened at the Norwegian base right up to the original’s iconic opening scene of a helicopter chasing a snowdog through the Antarctic desert.

Counterpoint: it’s literally called “The Thing”. It may link up narratively with Carpenter’s original, but you could remove the mid-credits scene and call it a complete remake with next to no issue. It’s closer to the 1982 film than it is to 1951’s The Thing From Another World, which is the original original. Even the poster is pretty much a remake.

If anything, the 2011 film’s existence in the purgatory between remake and prequel puts it in a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. It manages to retread the beats of Carpenter's film with the bland monotony of the least-inventive remakes, while simultaneously falling into the standard prequel trap of overexplaining minor details and providing answers to questions that nobody ever asked.

Not quite one, not quite the other, and definitely not the continuation of The Thing that anybody was looking for or interested in.