Four kinds of movie:

1. Those with stories/characters that studio execs believe have currently zero potential to attract the contemporary audience and make tons of money...

2. Movies, stories, characters that do not attract contemporary creators / have not enough artistic relevance to spark their interest in an updated or simply different "artistic" remake (the new Solaris is an example of a classic that creators tried to remake with a new but still artistic vision. It wasn't much of a success, but it's what they aimed for). Usually, it's movies that have lost all contemporary relevance (it doesn't mean it won't come back decades from now). I'd be surprised anyone remakes a faithful adaptation of 1984 any time soon, for instance, and when someone does it's very likely it will be transposed to become an allegory of a wholly different situation.

3. Movies under the copyright of their original creators. Those aren't likely to be remade by anyone in the next fifty years. Anything belonging to studios, as most movies do, is fair game to be resold though...

4. Absolute classics which relevance is mostly artistic and tied to the era they were made in (rather than also have a big entertainment value) and belong to history of cinema. A Hitchcock script can be transposed to a modern setting, Gone with the Wind could be remade, but what would be the point of re making Metropolis, or Citizen Kane?


I don't like remake that much (I like old movies too much, and I'm too curious about foreign cultures to need to see everything remade in the US), as most of them seem to be remade for commercial reasons only, and dumbed down (but then, I'm almost never the target audience for such remakes of old or foreign usually tailor-made for the American mass market, not for cinephiles) That said, I have strictly nothing against remakes, American or otherwise. The practice is as old as the world. There's zero difference between a north-american commercial remake of a cool Japanese or French movie and a folktale showing up in a zillion variations throughout the world. There's no difference between franchises milking characters for all they're worth and the hundreds of episodes and variations of stories with Finn MacCool, or King Arthur. Stories have been retold and adapted for different audiences, new generations and so on for millenia.

I think "remakes" are here to stay, and not only that but the phenomenon will increase more and more in the next decades, with the democratization of the means of production. We'll see more and more amateur remakes beside the commercial ones.