As Edgar Wright's reimagining of Stephen King's The Running Man hits cinemas, some more of the top-tier reboots, reinterpretations and straight-up redos of movies that we love
The conventional wisdom goes that most movie remakes suck -- or, at the very least, are unnecessary cash grabs that exist solely to line the pockets of movie studios, who seek to profit from existing nostalgia for the classics. It is the conventional wisdom because this has often been the case, as evidenced by every questionable Hollywood remake of a beloved horror film (see: 2006's The Omen, 2007's Halloween, or 2015's Poltergeist; hey, at least the A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot tried to do something a little novel), or foreign-language hit, or Golden Age oldie that should've been left in its original form.
But on occasion, there are remakes which hit the multiplex and feel like they're actually doing something new -- perhaps even better -- to innovate on the film they're based on in meaningful ways. Some are even just flat-out improvements on the movies that have come before them. To compile the below list of ten, we haven't hand-wrung too much over the meaning of "remake" -- we've included some movies that are more like reimaginings of shared source material, like Edgar Wright's recent adaptation of The Running Man, out in cinemas this past weekend. Do pause and think on that before sending me a furious email demanding that we work on our own remake.
A big fan of Stephen King since he was a kid, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright opted to make a more faithful version of The Running Man compared to the Arnie schlockfest from 1987, an enjoyable bit of '80s B-movie magic in itself. Sticking closely to the original plot, Wright's film stars Glen Powell as Ben Richards, a blue-collar dock worker in a dystopian alternative U.S. that is essentially ruled over by a monolithic TV network, which controls everything that anyone sees -- and thus, believes. Needing money for his sick child, he soon signs up for the titular Running Man, the world's most dangerous reality show in which he is hunted across the country by a team of cartoonish hitmen. It's an explosive actioner that calls back to the best of the '80s action wave, with Wright injecting it all with his trademark verve and kinetic style.