15 Movies You Didn't Know Were Remakes

One of the most common complaints about Hollywood these days is that nothing's original anymore: how often does a filmmaker burst onto the scene with an idea as unique as, say, Inception or Looper? It's all sequels, reboots, remakes, re-imaginings and any other marketable term producers might use to dress their laziness up. This article is specifically focusing on remakes, and, to their credit, these 15 movies have done a pretty splendid job concealing the fact that they're remakes at all. This is largely because the source material is so niche and little-known, so enterprising Hollywood execs have taken advantage of this fact by taking decades-old product, giving it a modern sheen with a popular new cast and milking the results all the way to the bank. These remakes vary wildly in quality: some are terrible, some are mediocre remakes of mediocre movies, and some vastly surpass the source material (which in some cases aren't even feature-length). Everyone knows that Scarface, The Thing and The Departed are remakes, and that Sergio Leone and George Lucas ripped plenty of their "ideas" off from Akira Kurosawa, but these ones got away with it. Here are 15 movies you didn't know were remakes...