20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

It’s difficult to think of a more glaring misstep in movie-making history than the decision to remake 1967’s seminal comedy-drama Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner - one of the most culturally and politically important films in history - by reversing the racial roles and dumbing the premise down to the level of SNL sketch comedy.

In the original, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter brings her new fiancé home to meet her parents: a black man, played by Sidney Poitier. Upper class liberals who’ve instilled in her a respect for race and equality, the parents find themselves confronted with uncomfortable prejudices they didn’t know they had.

At the time, the civil rights movement was in full swing: prior to shooting the film, seventeen US states still held interracial marriage to be illegal, and those anti-miscegenation laws wouldn’t be overturned until six months before the film’s release.

That’s not just a hot topic, it’s a hot potato, and the film was considered so important by the cast that they agreed to star in it without even seeing a script. In 1968, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards: Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress, and the screenplay won for Best Original Screenplay.

Guess Who, by contrast, tries to win bargain basement culture clash chuckles from the idea that the late Bernie Mac is unhappy that his daughter has brought home a white man to meet her family. That’s literally everything that director Kevin Rodney Sullivan brought to the table. You’d have thought there’d be a little more mileage in the fact that the white man in question was Ashton !*$% Kutcher, but no.