20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History
As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.
It’s said that George Lucas has ruined the idea of the prequel for everyone, while for years now, the sequel has been synonymous with the law of diminishing returns… but there’s a special kind of loathing reserved for the remake.
Well, the recent proliferation of movie franchises has presented a whole new subset of the remake: the reboot, whereby the basic tenets of the franchise are retained but the moviemakers tell the story from scratch.
Of course, if you really enjoyed the previous iteration, then the reboot can be infuriating. Plenty of people who loved Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy took umbrage at the two Amazing Spider-Man movies, and some fans of Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker raised merry online hell when Marvel and Sony agreed to reboot the wallcrawler yet again for the MCU.
However, not all remakes and reboots are evil: Some Like It Hot, Ocean’s Eleven, Scarface, 12 Monkeys, and Heat are all remakes, and arguably better than any of the films that they remade, while Nolan’s Batman reboot revitalised the character. Those who loudly protest the creative bankruptcy of the remake/reboot are usually complaining about the execution rather than the conception.
Some are just redundant, a waste of everyone’s time; some completely miss the point of the original; and yes, some are terrible, terrible movies that should have been aborted in development. Whether rejected by audiences or crapped on by critics, these are the most hated remakes and reboots in cinema history. And of course, here be spoilers...
20. Assault On Precinct 13 (2005)
French director Jean-Francois Richet’s wholly unnecessary remake of John Carpenter’s classic low budget thriller from 1976 replaces everything interesting and entertaining from the original movie with a brainless Swiss cheese plot and generic yet still gratuitous violence.
In the original movie, the titular police precinct, on a skeleton staff and hours from being shut down, is under siege from a street gang who’ve stolen a shipment of firearms and sworn a blood oath of vengeance against the citizens and police of Los Angeles.
The poor fools inside - a combination of police, admin staff, and convicted criminals - are just the latest victims of the gang’s nihilistic killing spree, and must try to work together to survive against overwhelming odds.
The remake, on the other hand, sees a cadre of crooked police officers attempt the same siege in order to silence a potential witness to their corruption, gang lord Bishop, before he can turn the state’s evidence against them.
There have to be at least a dozen less obvious and dramatic ways for the police to enter a police precinct and abduct a suspect in custody than cutting the power and phone lines, somehow jamming cellphone signals and then shooting their way in. Gabriel Byrne’s Duvall is a police captain: that means he outranks Ethan Hawke’s sergeant by a long, long way.
In fact, Bishop hasn’t told anyone about the dirty cops on his payroll, and only spills the beans after the siege has begun, and the second wave of masked (police) gunmen has tried to shoot their way in to kill him… masked gunmen, by the way, that are carrying their identification and their police badges on them to incriminate themselves regardless of any plans Bishop has in that area.
None of this occurs to the villains of the story, because none of it has occurred to anyone involved in the making of this dumpster fire of a film. Even worse than its galling stupidity is that the film that thinks its audience is stupid also, treating the original movie as a set of loose guidelines rather than source material.