[bubblewand]

The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake.

The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake.

The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland (so, the one with that meme-able image of him pointing toward the camera) was a remake.

(Franchises? There are some from like the 40s that had a dozen or so entries over the next couple decades)

Many remake examples from almost all periods of filmmaking.

There were tons of remakes of silent films after talkies came about, then another wave of remakes of jankier-effects stagier-acting-style movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s when effects got way better and naturalistic acting took over in the 70s (plus some of these were remaking black & white to color).

[technothrasher]

> The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake.

I'm not sure it's quite fair to call the 1939 film a "remake". It was one in a line of adaptations of the book, and isn't otherwise really related to the other adaptations. It isn't the first, or the last, but it is the most famous.

[estimator7292]

The difference is between "I can tell this story better/more engaging/more entertaining/more realistic" vs "let's cash in on the success this movie had five years ago"

The Wizard of Oz was a new interpretation of Baum's original story. They put enormous effort into making the new film better than other interpretations, of which there were several. Which is why it's a successful, beloved classic!

The same really can't be said of this week's Marvel/DC remake of whatever they made a few years ago. It's just about being a cash grab and nothing else.

P.S. If you've never heard of the sequel 'Return to Oz', do yourself a favor and watch it without doing any research. Just go in straight blind, it really enhances the experience. If you drink, keep a bottle nearby, you'll need it.

[mrob]

>The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake.

I think it's more accurate to say they're both based off the same 1938 novella: "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell. The 1951 movie "The Thing from Another World" is a very loose adaptation because it omits the most important plot point of the shapeshifting alien imitating people. The 1982 movie "The Thing" is a closer adaptation that includes it. This makes it a much better movie even if you ignore the improved special effects, because the drama of the characters not knowing who's really the Thing is a big part of the appeal.

[alexpotato]

Exactly!

The opposite is also true: there are MANY authors who had entire series of books in the 1920s that were wildly popular yet largely unknown today.

I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.

[bubblewand]

Oh yeah one of those “memento mori” things for me is browsing shelves in flea markets with tons of 1890s-1930s popular fiction and appreciating how very many of the authors are now totally unknown. You can do something similar with bestseller lists by year on Wikipedia, go back far enough and even for someone with pretty deep recognition of historical authors it soon becomes a lot of “who? Who? Who?”

> I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.

Even sticking to relatively critically-acclaimed stuff it’s pretty easy to land on films that probably fewer than 1% of people in the Anglosphere (assuming initial popularity in that market) have seen, in the silent era, without going far off the beaten path. Go slightly farther and it’s likely just you and a very small number of other extreme film nerds among the living who’ve ever watched it.

Take DW Griffith, a giant of a director. Got what, 20+ surviving feature films of 40ish made? How many people alive have seen more than three of them? It’s a small number. Hell, it’s not a large number that have watched even one.