10 Movie Remakes With Better Endings Than The Original
Not all remakes are created equal.
Movie remakes understandably invite a ton of skepticism from audiences, especially as they often fail to capture the essence of the original and are made for no more reason than making a quick buck from a known brand.
Every so often, though, a remake emerges which, whether generally superior or not, manages to deliver an ending which unexpectedly improves upon what came before.
Though there are many better remakes which still dropped the ball at the finish line - The Departed just couldn't resist a more multiplex-friendly "happy" ending, could it? - these 10 remakes actually dared to go far above and beyond their inspiration.
Whether going to darker and more ambitious places that the original simply couldn't, delivering a finale that's more faithful to the source material, or offering up a revised ending more palatable to modern tastes, these 10 films left audiences with a greater sense of dramatic reward than their predecessors.
Though these remakes generally don't erase the originals, their better climaxes proved that talented filmmakers can create inspired revisions of existing material...
10. The Thing (1982)
Christian Nyby's original 1951 adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" wraps up with a decidedly tidier and more hopeful finale than John Carpenter's 1982 re-adaptation.
Nyby's The Thing from Another World ends with the titular extraterrestrial creature unambiguously defeated by the remaining humans, who reduce it to a pile of ash with an electric trap.
In the final scene, a message broadcast by the heroes then warns the world to "watch the skies," which in the decades since has been widely accepted to be a thinly-veiled, anti-communist statement.
But Carpenter's film is far more bleak, with the exact fate of the Thing left unknown, all while the two survivors, MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David), are doomed to slowly freeze to death together, each wary that the other might indeed be the Thing.
Between its brilliantly downbeat tenor and lack of a heavy-handed political allegory, Carpenter's finale wipes the floor with the '51 version, even if the original is still a highly entertaining movie in its own right.