We Get Do-Overs

The standard wisdom is that Hollywood remakes rarely improve on the originals, and certainly there’s no shortage of examples to validate that. If you can bear it, think of Melanie Griffith in Born Yesterday, Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond in Sabrina or Madonna in Swept Away. But in a handful of cases, the second stab has proved to be the keeper. The Coen brothers took a creaky John Wayne vehicle and turned it into an expertly crafted Western that lived up to its title in the 2008 True Grit remake that starred Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. George Cukor’s 1954 A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland and James Mason, wiped the floor with the 1937 version, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, just as Bradley Cooper’s 2018 take, in which he co-starred with Lady Gaga, bested the cheesy 1976 retread with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s heist movie franchise has yielded entries of variable quality, but almost all are superior to the original 1960 Rat Pack vehicle. Howard Hawks’ 1932 thriller Scarface is rightfully considered a gangster classic, but Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake overcame its negative reviews to become a cult monument to lurid ’80s excess, not to mention spawning a thousand memes of Al Pacino inhaling a mountain of coke. Kids from the ’90s might have fond memories of the TV miniseries based on Stephen King’s It, but that adaptation can’t compare to the visceral scares of Andy Muschietti’s blockbuster 2017 bigscreen version. Finally, in pairing Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, 1976’s Freaky Friday can’t help but be fun, though Mark Waters’ 2003 redo, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, is a gem that became a high-water mark for the body-swap comedy.

Freaky Friday We remember it all too well: Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris in the original 1976 (left) and Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in the 2003 remake.