This Is the Best Movie Remake Ever

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 14, 10:30AM EDT

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Movie producers do several things to recycle movies or movie franchises. The success this past weekend of “Black Widow” is another win for the Marvel franchise, and that franchise’s characters likely will be used again and again. The most successful franchises bring in billions and billions of dollars over the time they are in theaters and then are recycled for streaming. Another approach producers take is simply to remake older movies. In many cases, they can have similar scripts, nearly the same characters and perhaps the same setting.

Remaking a movie can be a dangerous business. People may forget the original, which means its “brand” has eroded. New directors may not be as skilled as the directors of the original.

24/7 Tempo has identified the best 25 movie remakes, based on audience and critic ratings on the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. There was an almost perfect split between older and newer remakes on our finalist list. Nineteen of the best remake movies were released after 2000 and 16 were released between 1959 and 2000. Of the more recent releases, six have come out in the past five years.

To determine the best remake of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based on each movie’s IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score. All ratings were weighted equally. Only films with at least 5,000 reviews on IMDb were considered. Supplemental data on domestic box office and production budgets by movie came from industry data site The Numbers.
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The best remake based on our measures is “Some Like It Hot,” released in 1959. Here are some of the details:

> Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
> Director: Billy Wilder
> IMDb rating: 8.2 out of 10
> Tomatometer score: 95%
> RT audience score: 94%

“Some Like It Hot” is a remake of the 1951 German film “Fanfaren Der Liebe,” which is a remake of the 1935 French film “Fanfare of Love.” The German film follows two men who disguise themselves as different people to find work. The American comedy centers on two musicians who witness the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. They pretend to be women so they can join an all-female band traveling the country and thus escape the mob.

Click here to see all the 25 best movie remakes of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.