I haven’t seen enough of the other genres to satisfyingly vent an opinion. (Though … Charlie And The Chocolate Factory rather fuels that fire.) While a different sort of remake, I dog-dug The Magnificent Seven (The Seven Samurai), but still we’re talking a different era without all the new-fangled effects and aspect ratios and glitter and glitz.

While I appreciate Ivey’s position above – he makes some good points – I have yet to plunk down to see the doppleganger of Footloose.

I agree with you regarding needing more original films. However, while books might not do remakes, they do do sequels or texts “inspired” by originals. How many fantasy series basically rehash LOTR (Terry Brooks, etc.)? And, don’t get me started on the number of regency “Pride and Prejudice” continuation novels (Darcy’s Daughters, The 2nd Mrs. Darcy, etc.) So, novels do it, too, but they just can’t get away with blatant plagiarism.

Regarding Evil Dead, @ Philly Comic Con, Bruce Campbell seemed pretty excited for the Ash reboot. He didn’t see it as a straight up remake, but gave it his seal of approval and talked about reviewing the dailies.

But you really hit the nail on the head when you said people who weren’t born when the original was out won’t be bothered to see it … because it’s old. Remakes are for that generation. Older folks like myself generally hate remakes of great films that we grew up with, with only a few that can stand up with the original. I’d like to see someone remake Plan 9 from Outer Space, but with a really good script, cast and special effects rather than a remake of King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, or even Rosemary’s Baby. Remakes of classics like The Haunting, Psycho and The Omen truly do fall into that “needless” category, and I worry that someone seeing an awful remake will assume the original is just as bad and miss out on something wonderful. So, I don’t think all remakes should be banned, but they should be better thought out and anything on the AFI list should be off limits!

Example: I reviewed the Footloose remake last year. I had friends who said they’d never see it, because it was a needless remake. But they missed out on a hilarious performance by Miles Teller, proof that Julianne Hough can do more than just sing and dance and the potential of a star being born in Kenny Wormald. I enjoyed the hell out of the flick, and the BluRay sits right next to the BluRay of the original on my shelf.

I guess I’m just more tolerant of remakes than others. If someone else comes along in 10 years and wants to remake Star Wars, I don’t think I’d be against it. That might be sacrilegious to say around my group of friends, but I’d welcome it.

And do we include reboots in this? If you don’t, everyone will just call everything a reboot instead of a remake. Did we need the Spider-Man reboot? Probably not, but what about Nolan’s Batman movies? I’m certainly glad those happened.

And it’s not like the originals no longer exist. You can still watch them. I think that’s where your argument has a bit of a problem in comparing it to the South Park episode’s statments. In these cases no one is doing anything to the originals. I don’t see it as the same thing as changing the originals like in your South Park example. Now, if when the Evil Dead remake comes out next year, Sam Raimi personally went around and destroyed every copy of the original movie, then yes, we would have a right to complain. But that movie is still going to exist. And in the year 2013, a large general audience isn’t going to go see Evil Dead 4 because too many people are ignorant to the original and won’t want to put forth the effort to “see the first three” before seeing the fourth one. However, you just simply title it Evil Dead and those same uninformed people won’t even know it’s a remake. I guess at the end of this, my thoughts are let the remakes flow and I still think they’ll either be great or sink on their own merits, regardless of their tie to a previous film.