Hollywood remakes: No new ideas?

We love movies here at How To Kill An Hour, we love enjoying them, we enjoy debating about them, we like to discuss what would make a good movie. But are we running out of original ideas? Hollywood remakes seem to happen each year and MusicMagpie took a deep dive into the history of cinema.

How many of the films that we have seen are remakes? How many of the films that you thought were originals but in fact were remakes. Which begs the question, is Hollywood becoming lazier and looking for a quick bit of cash? Is coming up with new and original ideas that difficult?

They investigated this and analysed over 100 years of movie remakes. Consequently this is a total of 1,438 films. Dating all the way back to 1902, they wanted to find out if Hollywood really are leaning on the remake market.

Factors

The factors that they researched are:

  • Which movie has been remade the most?
  • What other movies have been remade multiple times
  • How long we are waiting before remaking movies

Their analysis discovered that an average time between the original release of a film and a remake is 23 years. Whilst subsequent remakes having a shorter and shorter time frame between releases.

The longest time between remakes was 85 years. It’s a film called The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, the original released in 1920 and the remake in 2005. Dumbo was released in 2941 and a remake is due this year in 2019. Therefore marking a 78 year gap between releases.

Are remakes better? Find out the extensive list and rather interesting piece from MusicMagpie here. It’s an interesting read, some movies have been remade a total of 5 times! Such as Robin Hood, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and Brewster’s Millions.

Listen to the guys chatting about this by clicking here!

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