"What Happened To Waiting 20 Years For Remakes?"

Last weekend, the cinemas of America were bursting with several fine films — Captain America and Harry Potter in the multiplexes, The Guard, The Future, Tabloid, Project Nim at the art houses — yet the big hit was The Smurfs, a CGI-enhanced big-screen version of the intolerable, one-joke cartoon series from the 1980s. The film has been a punch line for months, but when the receipts were tallied up, The Smurfs came within a hair of beating the weekend’s top grosser, Cowboys & Aliens, co-starring no less than James Bond and Han Solo.

Suddenly, the previous big question surrounding The Smurfs (“How the hell did that get made?”) has been replaced by a bigger one (“How the hell did that make so much money?”) and sadly, both questions have the same answer: the ’80s nostalgia factor. It is not a phenomenon confined to the singular occurrence of The Smurfs; my own visit to multiplex this weekend confirmed the existence, via trailers and posters, of similarly unnecessary and unwelcome remakes of artifacts like Conan the Barbarian, Footloose, and Fright Night.

Why are these films being made? Because the people who make movies (and even, increasingly, decide what movies are made) are getting younger and younger — young enough to have been children and teenagers in the 1980s, and to have fond memories of a show like The Smurfs and a film like Footloose, and if it was good then, it would be even better now, yes?
 -  Jason Bailey

As I put on the comments section:

The new Conan film isn't a remake any more than Captain America is a "remake" of the 1990s Matt Salinger film - or the Reb Brown tv movies, for that matter. Like Captain America, Conan has had a long following in books, comics and other media dating back to his first appearance in 1932, in "The Phoenix on the Sword" by Robert E. Howard. A new Conan film had been in development since the 1990s, but was only made into a film now because of constant fumbling and missteps by Warner Brothers. There were at least two occasions where development on a Conan film were getting pretty far along, before something or other (usually because Arnold chose to do a different film, or went into politics). To attribute Conan being made only now due to '80s nostalgia is to completely ignore the recent history of the film franchise.

In fact, this idea of Hollywood executives making films they're nostalgic for is nothing new in Hollywood. Why do you think so many black-and-white films like Ben-Hur and The Man Who Knew Too Much suddenly got colour films in the '50s and '60s? For the same reason that silent films were remade into talkies - and the same reason '80s films are being remade now - because Hollywood was never about originality. Remakes have been a fixture of Hollywood since the dawn of the business.

Don't believe me? Here are a list of remakes made before 1970, which were made ten years or less after the original. I'm not including adaptations, because the list would be preposterously huge otherwise. But it shows that this insane notion of Hollywood only now running out of original ideas is nothing short of... inaccurate.  (that's all I could think of saying.)

Hoodman Blind (1913) remade as Hoodman Blind (1923) - 10 years
The Golden Chance (1915) remade as Forbidden Fruit (1921) - 6 years
The Three Godfathers (1916) remade as Marked Men (1919) - 3 years
The Grocery Clerk (1919) remade as The Counter Jumper (1922) - 3 years
His Royal Slyness (1920) remade as Long Fliv the King (1926) - 6 years
Outside the Law (1920) remade as Outside the Law (1930) - 10 years
The Unknown Cavalier (1926) remade as Ride Him, Cowboy (1932) - 8 years
Duck Soup (1927) remade as Another Fine Mess (1930) - 3 years
Land Beyond the Law (1927) remade as The Big Stampede (1932) - 5 years
Love 'em and Weep (1927) remade as Chickens Come Home (1931) - 4 years
London After Midnight (1927) remade as Mark of the Vampire (1935) - 8 years
Seventh Heaven (1927) remade as Seventh Heaven (1937) - 10 years
Somewhere in Sonora (1927) remade as Somewhere in Sonora (1933) - 6 years
The Phantom City (1928) remade as Haunted Gold (1932) - 4 years
Lost Patrol (1929) remade as The Lost Patrol (1934) - 5 years
Teacher's Pet (1930) remade as Bored of Education (1936) - 6 years
The Dawn Patrol (1930) remade as The Dawn Patrol (1938) - 8 years
Range Feud (1931) remade as The Red Rider (1934) - 3 years
The Mayor of Hell (1933) remade as Crime School (1938) - 5 years
Penthouse (1933) remade as Society Lawyer (1939) - 6 years
The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933) remade as They Made Me a Criminal (1939) - 6 years
Viktor und Viktoria (1933) remade as First a Girl (1935) - 2 years
Intermezzo (1936) remade as Intermezzo (1939) - 3 years
The Walking Dead (1936) remade as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) - 3 years
Pépé le Moko (1937) remade as Algiers (1938) - 1 year(!)
Le Corbeau (1943) remade as The 13th Letter (1951) - 7 years
Van Gogh (1947) remade as Van Gogh (1948) - 1 year(!)
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) remade as Missile to the Moon (1958) - 5 years
Seven Samurai (1954) remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960) - 6 years
Jigoku (1960) remade as Jigoku (1970) - 10 years
Yojimbo (1961) remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - 3 years
Irma la Douce (1963) remade as Irma la Douce (1972) - 9 years

What about some modern examples of quick-turnaround remakes?

L.A. Takedown (1989) remade as Heat (1995)) - 6 years

... That's it.

But what about foreign-to-English Language remakes, which I'll expand to include modern times?

Castle of Blood (1964) remade as Web of the Spider (1971) - 7 years
Le Jouet (1976) remade as The Toy (1982) - 6 years
La Chèvre (1981) remade as Pure Luck (1991) - 10 years
Three Men And A Cradle (1985) remade as Three Men and a Baby (1987) - 2 years
Force Majeure (1989) remade as Return to Paradise (1998) - 9 years
La Femme Nikita (1990) remade as Point of No Return (1993) - 3 years
La Totale! (1991) remade as True Lies (1994) - 3 years
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) remade as Tortilla Soup (2001) - 7 years
Nattevagten (1994) remade as Nightwatch (1997) - 3 years
Un indien dans la ville (1994) remade as Jungle 2 Jungle (1997) - 3 years
L'Appartement (1996) remade as Wicker Park (2004) - 8 years
Shall We Dansu? (1996) remade as Shall We Dance (2004) - 8 years
Taxi (1996) remade as Taxi (2004) - 8 years
Abre Los Ojos (1997) remade as Vanilla Sky (2001) - 4 years
Insomnia (1997) remade as Insomnia (2002) - 5 years
Ringu (1998) remade as The Ring (2002) - 4 years
Nueve Reinas (2000) remade as Criminal (2004) - 4 years
One Missed Call (2004) remade as One Missed Call (2007) - 3 years
Shutter (2004) remade as Shutter (2008) - 4 years
Il Mare (2000) remade as The Lake House (2006) - 6 years
L'ultimo bacio (2001) remade as The Last Kiss (2006) - 5 years
Mostly Martha (2001) remade as No Reservations (2007) - 6 years
Infernal Affairs (2002) remade as The Departed (2006) - 4 years
The Eye (2002) remade as The Eye (2008) - 6 years
Klatretøsen (2002) remade as Catch That Kid (2004) - 2 years
Interview (2003 film) remade as Interview (2007 film) - 4 years
Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) remade as The Grudge (2004) - 1 years
Brødre (2004) to Brothers (2009) - 5 years
Sigaw (2004) to The Echo (2008) - 4 years
Anthony Zimmer (2005) remade as The Tourist (2010) - 5 years
# 13 (2010) from 13 Tzameti (2005) - 5 years
[REC] (2007) remade as Quarantine (2008) - 3 years
LOL (Laughing Out Loud) (2008) remade as LOL: Laughing Out Loud (2011) - 3 years
Anything for Her (2008) remade as The Next Three Days (2010) - 2 years

So next time someone complains about a remake of Krull or The Breakfast Club as another example of Hollywood running out of ideas, remember - this is nothing new. Stop acting as if it is.