I think that remaking movies has become way too prevalent in the movie industry today. There is a time and place for a remake, but more often than not, a movie is remade when it doesn’t have to be, and it causes the movie market to be consumed by serviceable reruns of the same stories that we all know because a studio needs to make a quick buck. 

There can be good remakes. Not all remakes are bad, but the most recent remakes that come to mind were lacklustre at best. I think that if a movie still has cultural significance, then there is no reason to remake it. 

The most recent example being the 2019 remake of The Lion King. The original Lion King released in 1994 had such a great societal impact that remaking it was a mistake and ratings of the movie show the same. The original stands tall at a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, while the remake sits at a 54%. A similar canyon can be seen with Aladdin and its remake, and although the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast came off a little better, it still lost 20 percentage points to its source material. 

I also dislike it when a studio or company remakes an animated movie in live-action. The reason a lot of animated movies were special in the first place is that there are just some things that can not be done as well with CGI. Animation is meant to give the creator or artist more creativity with character designs and to be able to show things that are too surreal to be transferred into real life. 

Other remakes that are just made for cash grabs are remakes that are made to try and revitalize a franchise of movies, particularly in the slasher/horror genre. When horror movies are remade, movie studios never try to have a new and interesting take on the movie, they just try to take half of the old script with a technology upgrade and call it a new beginning. 

There are remakes that take a source material that has been out of the public eye enough to deserve attention or ones that add enough to the original to have a story to tell. Little Shop of Horrors is a big-screen adaptation of the musical of the same name, which was itself taken from the 1960 movie. The original movie wasn’t a huge success and was 26 years old when the remake came out. It also added to the original movie in adding the musical element, it is all around made well. 

Remakes are not always bad movies. But many of the recent movies to hit the big screen have not lived up to their predecessors, and are most obviously made just to take advantage of nostalgia, and are not made to make a good movie. Whether it be remaking classic movies without any of the charm or effort that was put into the original, or trying to bring back a dead franchise for that sweet cash money.