Movie Reboots That Tried To Tell The Same Story With One MASSIVE Change
While older remakes involved doling out the same basic story with new casts and technology, Hollywood has recently engaged in a trend of making movie remakes with major differences. Directors and producers have been searching through the franchise archives and breathing new lives into these films with modern spins. Whether that's diversifying the casts, shoehorning in millennial tropes, or ultimately, just trying to do something new with the films.
Who wants to see the same film again anyway? It's always more fun to switch up the setting and characters if the story is going to be revisited. Although, some of the big changes made in the spirit of updating a dated film have been better than others.
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In both versions of Evil Dead, a group of friends travel to the woods to spend the night in a cabin. While there, they find the Naturom Demonto - AKA the Book of the Dead - and resurrect a malevolent spirit. While those basic principles remain the same, a lot of the trappings of the film were changed for the remake.
In the remake, the friends aren't just at the cabin to have fun. They're there because one of the friends, Mia, is trying to quit using, so they're all there in support. The original film chooses to focus primarily on Ash, the only friend who doesn't get possessed. The remake splits time a little more evenly and ultimately focuses a bit more heavily on Mia, the character that was possessed first. The remake also adds a bit more lore to the film, as the possessed Mia is working towards the explicit goal of capturing five souls to unleash a creature known as the Abomination. Eventually, Mia is healed, but everyone else perishes.
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In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a girl named Nancy and her friends are bombarded in their dreams by a deranged ghost named Freddy Krueger. Eventually, they learn that Freddy was a child slayer who was apprehended, released on a technicality, and then burned alive by their parents. In the new one, as Nancy and her friends attempt to learn more about Freddy, they realize that they don't have any memories of each other before high school, even though they have pictures to prove they knew each other.
They eventually find out that Freddy was a child predator and used to work as a groundskeeper at the preschool they attended, so they visit the preschool to investigate. This adds a new set-piece as they search for Freddy's hidden room where he committed his misdeeds. In this version, it was Nancy herself who reported Freddy's wrongdoings to her parents, making his hatred towards her more personal.
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The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (and the simplified remake title The Taking of Pelham 123) features a group of crooks taking a subway car's worth of passengers hostage to get a ransom. In the original, the lead hijacker, Mr. Blue, was a former mercenary in Africa. In the update, to cash in on the Wall Street buzz in a post-2008 media landscape, the villain was a former investor named Mr. Ryder.
As it turns out, Mr. Ryder was staging the hijacking in an attempt to manipulate the markets. Also notable is the switch in protagonists. Instead of following a transit cop named Garber who's attempting to stop the crooks, it follows a train dispatcher named Walter Garber.
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People that have heard of Friday the 13th most likely associate it with Jason Voorhees and his iconic hockey mask. Well, those people would be shocked to then watch the first Friday the 13th film and discover that Jason isn't part of it at all. Instead, it's his mom that's the slayer, and Jason doesn't start haunting camps until the sequels.
Well, when it came time to reboot the property in 2009, that obviously wouldn't do. Now that fans had a taste of Jason, that's who they wanted to see slashing camp counselors. So, this reboot opens with the events of the first movie, then quickly skips ahead to Jason doing the slashing. So, in a way, this movie is able to tell the story of the first film while combining the best elements of the later entries.
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In Pet Sematary, a grieving father brings his child back to life through an ancient burial ground in the woods. In both versions, the father, Louis, has two children - a boy named Gage and a girl named Ellie. Oddly enough, depending on which version you watch, it's a different child that perishes. In the original, it's Gage who meets an untimely end, and in the remake, it's Ellie.
The director of the film had a number of reasons for the change. For one thing, he had three daughters himself, so exploring the relationship between Louis and his daughter was more personal for him. For another, Gage is only a toddler, whereas Ellie is 9. According to the director, "I was thinking, an evil 2 year old, yeah, that can be scary. But an older, more fully formed child makes it a more credible threat.”
The original Valley Girl tells the story of two star-crossed lovers from different sides of the tracks. It's a classic love story in the style of Romeo and Juliet, taking place in the famed San Fernando Valley. Years later, in a 2020 remake of the '80s classic, a mother retells the story of her '80s love to her daughter. Just like how the '80s are looked upon with nostalgia from the current culture, the '80s as seen through the eyes of this middle-aged mother are a bit different. For one thing, the movie became a jukebox musical as she and her '80s pals sang along to the music of the time.
In a conversation between the mother and daughter, the daughter incredulously asks, "You were singing and dancing on a fountain?" To which the mother responds, "That's how I remember it!" Together, the films work to showcase how the '80s actually were and how they are nostalgically remembered.
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In Overboard, a laborer does a job for a rich jerk. The laborer ends up not being paid, and the rich jerk ends up falling off their yacht and developing amnesia. The laborer then decides to take advantage of the situation by convincing the rich jerk they're their spouse in an attempt to make up for the lost wages in the aforementioned job. Then, the two fall in love and ultimately end up together.
There's one big difference between the two versions, though. In the original, the laborer is a man, and the rich jerk is a woman. The reboot flips that on its head and has a conniving female laborer get revenge on a wealthy - but still very much a jerk - male.
As NPR's review of the film puts it, this change was most likely made because in 2018, the gender dynamics of a man basically forcing a woman into a life of domestic servitude would have been a bit frowned upon. Instead, in the new one, Anna Faris's character just makes the rich jerk get a job at a construction company. Kidnapping, sure, but somehow better? Maybe?
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Anyone attempting to adapt The Amazing Spider-Man into a movie has a wealth of eras and stories to draw from. The sheer breadth of Spider-Man stories makes it so every film adaptation is a little different from the last. For example, while Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man origin follows Amazing Fantasy #15 fairly closely, the later Andrew Garfield Spider-Man chooses to focus on a story that was later retconned into the comics
In Garfield's version, his father is a scientist caught up in a conspiracy related to Dr. Connors's work. This conspiracy is shown to be why Peter is sent to live with Aunt May and Uncle Ben in the first place.
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In both the 1990 and 2012 versions of Total Recall, a man named Douglas Quaid begins to remember his old life as a spy. While the central conflict remains the same through the different films, their setting is incredibly different. The 1990 film takes place almost entirely on Mars, where an evil governor is fighting a resistance happening within the colony. Strangely enough, the 2012 remake takes Mars away entirely and instead focuses on the few remaining inhabitable colonies on Earth.
The reason for the change is actually pretty simple: the director of the 2012 story was trying to follow the original book a bit more closely. In his own words, "Our biggest difference with the Verhoeven film is that we don’t travel to Mars. Which - the book never goes to Mars, as well. They talk about it, but it all takes place on Earth."
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Any film with the name Karate Kid is going to tell the story of a child learning to defend himself against a group of bullies from the teachings of a kind handyman. Although, the 2010 remake did shake things up a bit by moving its protagonist out of the sunny San Fernando Valley and all the way across the world to China.
The Los Angeles Times implied that the move was mostly to increase revenue in the Chinese box office. Whatever the reason, it was an interesting setting shift that made the movie stand out from its predecessor.
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Spirits are out, artificial intelligence is in. The 2019 remake of Child's Play was firmly set in the 21st century, exchanging the corny origin story of Chucky with a more technological reimagining. Both films are ultimately still about a small toy terrorizing a mother and son, but they had very different ways of getting there.
In the original Child's Play, a serial killer on the loose made his way into a toy store where a little bit of voodoo put his fading soul inside a nearby doll. In the remake, a disgruntled factory worker tampered with one of the high-tech Buddi dolls his company produced before sending it out to wreak havoc on the life of the protagonist's family. Again, as long as a doll is terrifying a family, it's still Child's Play - but that's a pretty big difference.
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Mulan tells the story of a woman in China disguising herself as a man to take her father's place in the military. She eventually brings honor to her family by saving the life of the emperor.
Fans of the original Mulan will recall her dragon pal Mushu, a highlight of the film. But when it came time to make a live-action remake of the film, Disney decided to leave Mushu out completely. Producer Jason Reed explained the move, saying, "The dragon is a sign of respect, and it’s a sign of strength and power, and that sort of using it as a silly sidekick didn’t play very well with the traditional Chinese audience."
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The original Point Break follows Johnny Utah as he attempts to infiltrate a group of prominent bank robbers that he later discovers to be his new surfing buddies. The 2015 remake ups the ante, to say the least. They still surf, but now the group is committing heists as they travel the world to complete the Ozaki 8 (eight trials for different extreme sports meant to connect the participant with nature).
While this new film didn't quite have the heart (or the Keanu) of the original, it attempted to make up for it with an abundance of new set-pieces and action sequences. Still, the film remains basically the same. An FBI agent infiltrates a group of free-spirited bank robbers, and it ends with Johnny allowing the leader of the group to face his own judgment in the form of a giant wave.
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The original Fantastic Four film in 2005 took some liberties with the story it was adapting, but it mostly told the fantastic family's origin story in a similar manner as the comics they were based on. Reed is a scientist, Ben and Johnny are astronauts, Susan is a researcher, they embark on a mission into space together, and they're all adults.
In 2015's Fantastic Four, Reed and Ben are basically children who have spent their lives researching teleportation. They're then brought to a government-sponsored facility and continue their work with the facility director's children, Sue and Johnny. A mishap with a quantum gate gives them powers, which are then exploited by the government (except for Reed's abilities because he spends a year on the run).
With all their differences, both films end with the family defeating Victor Von Doom and declaring themselves the Fantastic Four.
