10 Remakes That Should Never Have Happened

It takes a great deal of skill, effort, and talent to produce a film capable of winning eleven Academy Awards. It also takes a great deal of skill, effort, and talent to produce the one of the biggest flops in history and simultaneously ruin the name of a great movie.

The original Ben-Hur was a triumph of cinema, telling an intelligent and very human story of a slave that became a champion charioteer, but never forgot the family he left behind. It produced the iconic chariot race sequence, which required three months and an entire second production unit to film, and an actual injury to a stuntman was even worked into the final cut of the film.

All for a few minutes of screen time.

Ben-Hur was a critical and commercial success, becoming the second-highest grossing film in history, and as said before, scooping eleven of the twelve Academy Awards it was nominated for.

The other Ben-Hur was certainly not a critical and commercial success, and it couldn't get anywhere near the Academy Awards even if it tried to bribe the doorman. Despite a $100 million budget, the 2016 incarnation attracted little in the way of serious star power, Morgan Freeman being a notable exception.

But worst of all, with almost sixty years of technological advancement, and seven times as much money as the original, the remake failed to do justice to the chariot scene. Over-edited and using far too much CGI, it lacked the grandeur and sheer scale of the 1959 version.