Film Remakes Were Always a Bad Idea | A Gene Production 

I think a major problem with remakes comes from the fact that a movie that wasn't really loved by someone isn't going to get remade & when you already love something that much, all you're doing by attempting to remake it is recapture something & not make art. Vice versa, if you hire someone to remake something that's already good as is, it's hard for them to be as invested, because it makes them feel like a hack.

The capsule didn't land on the moon twice, it was just edited in the wrong order. The reason I know this is because if you watch the 1956 film Around the World in 80 days, they played the film A Trip to the Moon and there you can see that they edited the scene in the right order.

Making the moon swallow the spaceship instead of getting gored by it is such a baffling decision. Maybe it's just my modern bias speaking, but if you're gonna change that aspect of the film then why bother remaking it at all? Also idk how anti-imperialist it is when the plot is basically the astronomers going on a murder spree in a foreign country then kidnapping a random person to use as a zoo exhibit.

Pinocchio is my favourite film, so it sucks to see it get such a mishandled live action remake. The real (and most cynical) reason Disney keeps making these is because they think “cartoons=kids stuff, live action=adult stuff”. Former CEO Bob Chapek even said it in an interview recently. It’s a really bad way of categorising animation, because plenty of adults still watch it. The only adults watching the live action remakes are parents who were tricked into remembering the originals existed, and expecting something more for them. A few decades ago, Disney’s strategy of adding onto their animated movie catalog was to produce cheaper spin-off shows and direct to video sequels, make their movies franchises in their own right. The results were hardly ever great, but I’d rather those return than them keep pranking parents with these live action remakes.

in concept the most offensive remake to me is Ben Hur (2016) like, how does someone go, "yeah Ben Hur, what a stinker, just very visually and technically boring, we can fix it, all 11 of those Oscars were flukes" my god the hubris of greed like that. anyway great video!

I love that Disney went from being a beloved touchstone of generations of childhoods to the most potent icon of soulless corporate greed. They lived long enough to see themselves become the villian :)

Remakes aren’t a bad idea, they can illustrate other artists visions on the same story, but they have to have something to tell, like 1982’s The Thing, 1984’s Scarface, 1986’s the fly, 1986’s little shop of horrors, 1998’s The Parent Trap or 2005’s King Kong, and I could go on and on pointing out all the great remakes in cinema history. The problem comes when you have studios like Disney uses this concept to create a decal of their previous movies basing themselves by the Nostalgia to have some easy money. Yes there are other remakes that don’t work and are not like the Disney ones, like 2014’s Robocop or 2012’s Total Recall. But their problem does not come from the fact they’re remakes instead it comes from the fact that they’re bad movies even if they were original. So it is not just: Remake=bad Original=good

I've never seen the point of remaking beloved classic films, especially when you're just doing a shot for shot recreation. I genuinely think that the best use for remakes is to take a weak or forgotten film that had a lot of promise or an interesting concept that was poorly executed and bring out its potential. Best example of this is John Carpenter's The Thing which took a pretty schlocky, barely remembered horror movie based on a much more interesting book and remade it into a veritable classic

Segundo de Chomón was a genius as great as Melies, considered by many film historians as the inventor of the stop-motion. Sadly, he died completely forgotten and as poor as a rat. In the 1910s, obtaining physical copies of certain movies was extremely difficult and the concept of "remaking a film" wasn't far removed from "re-staging a play". Even the rights over a movie were tied to the celluloid, and not it contents. Chomón was asked to make a new version of "Trip to the moon" because there was not enough copies of the original around and it was a very popular film at the time, specially among children. He added some stuff like the moon "eating" the ship because he DID NOT WANT to make a shot-by-shot remake. Shortly after, Chomón went to make the complex special effects of the italian epic "Cabiria": the first modern movie (predating "The birth of a nation" by two years).

The best remake of Trip to the Moon is the Tonight Tonight music video. Such a classic in it's own right, and introduced me to Méliès.

I watched the Jungle Book remake when it came out and I hadn't even watched the original, but I could still tell I was watching the inferior version of something. In the words of Bennett Foddy, "They're trash, and I don't mean they look bad or that they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in a way that food becomes trash as soon as you put them in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage"

For what it's worth, out of curiosity about five years ago I tested to see if it was true that remade movies are worse than originals, at least as a measure of audience approval. I went through all the remakes listed on Rotten Tomatoes & IMDB tallying each film's critic & audience scores. The results are enumerated below: Of around 130 remakes listed at the time, only 20 rated the same or better than the original in approval (15% of the total). Of this group about half were considered much better than the original film (ie. rated 15%+ higher approval). Conversely, 85 of the remakes scored worse than the original film (ie. rated 15%+ lower in approval). Within this domain, over 50 were rated much below the original movie (ie. rated at 40%+ lower in approval) with about a dozen rating 70% below the original in approval (the 2010 remake of Nightmare on Elmstreet being the worst rated film remake at 15% approval vs the original 1984 version rating at 93% or a drop of 78%!). So according to this, albeit crude, assessment, only about 8% of remakes are much better than originals, 8% are about the same, 84% are worse. Of the worse group, about 50% are much worse than average and 10% could be generously called abysmal.

Just found this video in my recommended, and I was surprised with how small your channel is. A Trip To The Moon was a silent film I was personally fascinated with ever since I saw the 2011 recolored version with that new Air soundtrack on Netflix. So hearing about all of this adds a whole other perspective to that movie.

(I apologize for the length but I feel compelled to share my thoughts, even if not shared by others.) I enjoyed your breakdown immensely! You opened my eyes to a problem that a lot of major IP franchises are facing and its mostly all due to Disney farting out what it can to lure fans into the cinema or worse- to keep them subscribing to streaming platforms with subpar productions and it’s all to make the stockholders happy. What I’m getting at is that in a way, they’ve taken the idea of the Méliès method of structuring films and made all sorts of unbearable movies where the studios throw out anything resembling a script, ignore the input of creatives best suited to handle these productions then Studio execs have directors blindly shoot with actors, effects, and stunts, only to assemble the final cut in an editing room piecing together a complete misunderstanding of the original IP themes without a coherent narrative. -ahem- Star Wars Sequel Trilogy-ahem They are banking on the spectacle and nostalgia being all viewers need. Only there isn’t a spectacle. They assume we will love these soulless shots and stunts with familiar faces and set pieces littered about. There are many videos going into this, but you, good sir, have in a way given a more clear answer as to what method, if any, Disney and Lucasfilm are using. Now this may be a bit off topic, but it’s the same way Méliès would assemble his spectacles and amazing visuals that were groundbreaking and stunning for the time that the narrative wasn’t the important part, although it served a purpose. It works. Taking this method and applying it to a series or saga of features with strong narratives and characters just doesn’t work. Akin to the South Park episode where we discover Family Guy jokes are written by a group of captive manatees that select at random cutaways and senseless humor, Disney is embracing this as an actual means of production. Thanks again for bringing this all to light about remakes, originality isn’t dead, respect for our predecessors and their art is what’s at death’s doorstep. “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” George Lucas

I must admit that when you mentioned The Mummy at 15.30 I got confused. At first I thought you meant the 1999 Brendan Fraser and the 1932 Boris Karloff movies, and was taken aback, like "Wasn't the 1999 one universally loved, and barely a remake of the 1932 one?" Then after googling, I found out about the 2017 version. I guess it was so underwhelming that I never even heard about it... Anyway, good job with the video! I've long been interested in early film history, but I didn't know someone remade A Trip to the Moon, so I learned something new there :)

So this what the moon from that film is what Futurama was referencing in the Whalers on the Moon Amusement Park episode. They really keep some obscure easter eggs lol

There's a movie which has a theme of old films and it is amazing. It's called Hugo and is just a good film that barely anyone ever talks about

The moon in the remake looks like something you find in some really obscure movie from like the 80s or 90s that barely anybody knows about & is some of the absolute most mind bogglingly bizarre pieces of mind screw to have ever been put together.

heres a cool funfact: my grandpas dad was french and his uncle was working at the movie theatre where the trip to the moon first "premiered", so my grandpas dad got free tickets to the movie!

When one reads about the writing process of these old classic Disney films such as Pinocchio, you see that the very simple narrative was completely intentional. Walt encouraged everyone to keep the stories as simple and basic as possible, because it allows for greater freedom with what you can do in the animation, its charm and the characters as well.

A Trip To The Moon is a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells’ First Men in The Moon. Like how Nosferatu was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

At the end of the day, there are only so many basic plots for a film. Most of the differences in films are just padding like where or when they are set. Still the same old sagas of "unexpected romantic entanglements that actually work out great" or "oops, we've accidentally created something evil that was meant for good", but the trick is to add something new by putting a different and innovative twist on them, which of course needs to be executed well in order to work. As you say, there have always been remakes of old films and re-hashes of old plots, but there just doesn't really seem to be any films that add anything to the classic films or classic plots as of late. CGI has certainly come a long way in the past 20 years, but seemingly not much else has in my opinion and the same can be said for video games. "Good graphics do not a good film make", as your Disney examples prove. Novelty in characters and innovations in filmmaking are the only way films can improve and today they seem rarer than ever probably due to the sheer number of them constantly being made. I really couldn't tell you the last modern-day film I watched or video game I played that I really thought "Wow, that was interesting. Never seen that before". The Wizard of Oz had the novelty of colour, Disney had animated feature films, Wallace and Gromit had claymation, The Matrix had its mind bending plot, and so you get the idea. How many incarnations of Superman, Star Wars, A Christmas Carol, King Kong, James Bond ....... can you really have whilst still keeping it interesting? I don't really see the value in watching a new version of Aladdin (which I did at Christmas) only to discover it is a near clone of the original, even down to the same songs and an almost identical script. I already know the plot, I am fairly familiar with the music, the actors aren't necessarily any better, and the original was great anyways. What is the point in tainting the memories of the classics by watching a remake unless the original was crap? Maybe I'm just a miserable git, but that's what I think about films.

To be fair, John Huston's 'The Maltese Falcon' was the third version of the book, so remakes can be great.

I do like the 2005 remake of King Kong. Sure, it suffered from Peter Jackson’s self-indulgent tendencies, but it was nice to see updates to the story, visuals, and portrayal of certain subject matter (e.g. gorillas and dinosaurs). The 1933 original is horribly dated in a number of ways, so remaking it with modern visuals and attitudes made some sense.

Not always. There are some remakes which are excellent in my opinion. But hey thanks for this video! Shadow of the Vampire is one of the most outstanding, shining examples of successful remakes or attempts at a remake. Well done and excellent presentation! Kind regards from Ásgeir in Iceland.

The moon lady eating the pod is funny as hell to me for some reason. 😂

A good Pinocchio remake that you didn’t mention was the 2020 one, it is still the story, but it adds on the dark story that the original book had, it resembles more the book than the 1940 Disney movie, which is how i think a good remake should be, adding on to the original or even resembling the book even more (if it’s based on a book of course)

I am baffled that you have only this many subs, this was such a good video. Keep it up man!

I loved this video, and I am glad I stayed until the end. I very much enjoyed the history and analysts of early and modern films. I hope that Gene will get to 10,000 subs this year!

I love random videos like this. A refreshing "phew" from the endless slew of recommended videos. I hope you gain traction. This video was REALLY good.

You should do a review/ analysis of HUGO. The movie Hugo was my introduction to a trip to the moon. I would love you going into it

Dude, only 430 subs!? You deserve more, this is quality content! Keep going!

Here's my favourite movie remakes: Dredd 2012 Scarface Bladerunner 2049 Funny Games 2006 The Things Tron 2009 The Ring Casino Royale Insomnia 12 monkeys 1995 The Magnificent 7 1960 Zodiac 2007 the girl with the dragon tattoo 2007 Heat Fist full of dollars The departed Reservoir dogs Ocean's 11 2011 Cape fear War of the wolds The Planet of the Apes trilogy Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 Suspiria 2018 (this is technically not a remake but I'm still gonna put it in) *Edit I forgot about: Perfect blue/Black Swan Devilman Crybaby It 2017 Mad max fury road FREAKY FRIDAY 2003 I AM LEGEND 2007 HALLOWEEN 2007 THE MUMMY 1999 CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY 2005 (it that bad ngl) Vanilla Sky Dune Invasion The fly Remake aren't the problem, greedy film studios trying to make money out of old projects without putting any care, effort, or respect to the og is the real problem

You forget that a remake (Ben-Hur), is tied as the film with the most Oscar awards.

I think remakes work best when the remake is not a carbon copy of the original. So for example, the 1982 'The Thing' was a remake of the 1951, 'Thing from Another World.' Both share pretty much the same story line, but are so different that they are both great movies. We also love some movies because we find them nostalgic (warts and all) and they bring back great memories. So when they are remade scene for scene, but with a load of CGI thrown in, it just doesn't work for most of us.

Really good video. I just wish there was more commentary on the corporate cynicism underlying newer films pushed by studios. Regardless, keep up the good work. I'll keep my eye on this channel.

I saw Hugo a few days ago on my film class and this pops up, I dont know if to be pleased or scared

Absolutely underrated channel.

I think a big reason a lot of good remakes are good is because of how cultural and regulation standards have changed The 2017 IT was allowed to explore the story of the book a lot more fully than the 1990 film that was restricted to TV content standards. Scarface and The Thing were allowed to explore much darker and visceral themes in the remakes than would have been culturally accepted when the original versions came out. And a lot of bad remakes are ones where the films potential wasn't held back by what audiences/ratings boards were willing to accept. Cinderella and jungle book didn't have any themes or concepts that could be/needed to be expanded on by changing standards. RoboCop and Total Recall had their visceral impact and darker themes neutered by a more marketable PG-13 rating, and as such the originals were *less* held back than the remakes.

Funny thing is, I didn’t knew for the longest time that _Trip to the Moon_ was remade and I actually watched the remake first when I was a child. So when I watched the Original much, much later, I was confused that the Capsule *didn‘t* fly into the moon‘s mouth and assumed a Mandela-effect.

I was appalled to see this man only has 900 subscribers.

The original story of Pinocchio is a philosophy book mistaken as a children's fairy tale, akin to Animal Farm

Great video! Never seen or heard of Excursion to the Moon but that image of the Moon eating that spaceship is pure nightmare fuel in terms of it looking very bizarre and poor compared to Melies. I actually think that the remake version is also stealing from Melies's other movie The Impossible Voyage where the sun eats a train. I know of both of those movies simply because it features heavily in the music video to my all time favourite Queen song "Heaven For Everyone". Something tells me that that image of the moon eating that rocket is going to blow up into a meme after this...

This was great, subbed!

I think remakes can sometimes be warranted. When I think of good remakes, I usually think of 1959 Ben Hur. A movie that took a 1920s silent blockbuster and turning into a cinematic masterpiece. Remaking key spectacle scenes, like the naval battle and chariot race, improving the story and characters, and adding intriguing dialogue scenes that were impossible to make in the 1920s. I think movie remakes can be good if it can be drastically improved from the original while still accomplishing the same goal.

This guy has the potential to go viral

I dont think anyone minds that John Carpenter did his own version/remake of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World (which itself was based on novella "Who Goes There?")

This dude flow and linking between ideas is too smooth

Your Duel analysis was fantastic now onto this .... for a channel with 3k subs your great x

main problem with remakes are hype, u never remake bad movie, u always gonna choose a good movie, and by that u are putting yourself in position where u need to do something better then previous version, even if someone didnt watched old movie he heard about it as "this legendary movie" so hes gonna have really high expectations

Remakes as a concept are very valid, especially in the case where the cultural or technological limitations of the time get in the way of a film’s full potential (i.e. films made to favor the Hays Code and/or limited to black & white), but I have to admit that Disney’s recent bout of live action remakes are more comparable to “legal” bootlegs of films they own the copyright to rather than genuine attempts to make good films.

"Remakes should be for bad movies, not for classics" -A random meme i saw

So here’s the thing. You have a Remake and a Reboot. I think a lot of people get the two mixed. Up. A remake is as what it sounds like. A Re-MAKE. You take what was and you re-do it. If you have style you could add something new to make it fresher but otherwise a remake is the rehashing of a film that was already done. Psycho is a good example. You have Hitchcock’s version and the redone shot for shot version. That’s a remake. Studios want to make money. You guys as the public have to understand that. It is a business. You guys wouldn’t complain about McDonalds selling the same Big Mac right? Every day they literally re make Big Macs. You order one, the next person comes and orders it. The worker has to re make the same burger. They might add a extra pickle or whatever but its the same thing. A re. Make. - A reboot is when you take a property and you totally give it a fresh make over. Power Rangers 2017 is a perfect example of a reboot. They took the dinosaur concept and mixed it with aliens. (Was it successful) no, but as a reboot, it was in that sense. House party that is about to come out is a reboot of the original House Party. - IDK why this movie exists, no one asked for it. But here we are in 2023.

Thank you for helping me to finally understand what's going on in a trip to the moon I've been confused about the films plot since I saw it

Damn congratulations on a very good video. Glad to see you getting some real viewership off of your hard work

The all quiet on the western front remake was pretty good

Every once in awhile, RU-vid actually manages to recommend a video from a channel I haven't seen before, and gets it RIGHT! I really enjoyed this video and you get a like and subscribe from me today. I was very surprised to learn that there had been a remake of "A Trip to the Moon". I absolutely love the surviving films of Georges Méliès. He was the unrivalled genius of his time and his is a fascinating and tragic tale. It's no wonder I hadn't heard of the copycat version, as it is of little or no consequence. Some remakes border on the blasphemous (Russell Brand's remake of "Arthur" jumps to mind), or just plain redundant (Spiderman), but every once in awhile somebody manages to improve upon the original. The live-action release of "Pete's Dragon" with Robert Redford was a major rescuing of a terrible mid 70s Disney movie, in my opinion. Anyway, blah blah blah.... I dig your channel and I'm glad I found it. ☮

Cool video and all. Also i love the way you say film.

That thumbnail is nightmare fuel.

true grit? the departed? ocean's 11? a star is born? dune? it? the thing?

You shat on Disnay and gave me a history lesson. U earned a sub.

I hate how Martin Scorsese described modern films as theme parks. Since most theme parks spend millions of dollars and years of time perfecting themselves but most modern films do not

There have been some really good remakes though. Ben Hur of the early sixties was remake of the silent film version, and though the silent film version was really good, the 60s version still did so much better and won a record number of Academy Awards. The early 80s version of The Thing was also much better than the original version. I hope remakes still get made because sometimes they can still be really good.

I clicked because of the thumbnail. I think we now know where the moon from The legend of Zelda Majora's mask got the idea from. That moon with a face looks creepy.

I think the reason Mattel remakes are relatively good is the fact that they re-use names and designs and give artist relative freedom with the story (she-ra , some of the barbie movies/revisions and so on) so the product has a chance to be more then a cheep copy

Nice video and I absolutely loved your creatively done intro. Keep it up!

Incredible video about a topic I didn't know I was interested in. Very well done!

I still say the Ghostbusters remake would’ve worked if it followed a new branch in Chicago or New Orleans.

@3:52: This is where Futurama got their inspiration for that Moon mascot from, after Bender stabbed him in the eye with a beer bottle.

I think a few remakes work pretty well. We have several different Christmas Carols which are really good, the two A Star Is Born remakes made a huge profit and won Oscars for their nominated songs, and the 96 version of Romeo and Juliet gave the story a modern twist that actually worked well.

It's one of the many reasons I just cannot watch TV anymore. It's not even just Disney anymore. It's nearly all the corporations these days :(

Remakes should only be for movies with good premises but terrible execution

I think difference between a game remake and a movie remake is that with game remakes they kinda change the core gameplay to fit the modern style, as well as being more accessible Movies however, aren't bound to hardware, so when you remake a movie, you need to understand what made the original good, and how you can up it, etc

Although... There have been remakes that surpass the original by far, so I guess it depends on the quality of the movie itself and how it captures or elevates the original

You could reasonably make the argument that either Muybridge's "Horse in Motion" or Le Prince's "Roundhay Garden" was the first motion picture ever made. Others prefer to begin their histories of the motion picture with the Edison/Dickson invention of the kinetoscope. The very first kinetoscope was "Monkeyshines No. 1," which was immediately followed by a remake, "Monkeyshines No. 2." I daresay in almost every respect the remake was superior to the original, although the original rather brilliantly if completely accidentally conjured up a ghost-like image, which if you think about it for a second is kind of a perfect metaphor for what the cinema does. "Monkeyshines No. 3" is apparently the cinema's first lost film - if it indeed ever existed. ("Monkeyshines" means fooling around, by the way.) The Lumiere Brothers first cinematograph was "Workers Leaving the Factory," which they remade a number of times. One of the sequels was mistaken for the original for most of the cinema's history. Factory Gate films became something of an established genre in the early cinema and the ones made was James Kenyon and Sagar Mitchell (later dubbed "The Electric Edwardians" after they were rediscovered) are almost infinitely more beautiful and moving than the similar ones made by the Lumieres 5-to-10 years previously. "Alfred Butterworth and Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinworth" (1901) is particularly joyous and poignant. Great stuff!

858 subs? Is that right?? Wow this video really got the algorithm’s attention. 858 subs plus one!

i found these 100 years old horror movies very scary and creepy

Nice video! You seriously have a lot of potential my friend! I wish you great amounts of happiness and success! :)

This video is very enjoyable.

back to the future is awsome, how does someone so good turn so bad :(

here are some time stamps for yay 0:00 - Start 4:28 - To The Moon and Back 10:47 - Disney

*DAVID CRONENBERG'S 'THE FLY'. _I rest my case._

Wow, I didn't know Georges Melies was even a real person. The reason I watched this is because I just watched the movie "Hugo".

I've learned over the years that trying to recapture the magic of some past event or whatever never works out. The difference is it was a new experience back then. when you try to recapture that it falls short. Seek novelty in everything. The best memories in life are made from new experiences. That's not to say you can't re-experience the feeling of watching a favorite film over again, but trying to recreate it just feels forced and unnatural.

"A trip to the moon" is one of my favourite movies together with "Un chien andalou".

It’s finally back up

Is it pronounced film or fillum? I can't figure out any pattern as to why it's one way in some sentences and the other in other sentences

bro you have the music used in the description but not the movies just to note I saw u mention the cat in there, nice.

Voyage de la lune, the thumbnail video, is probably one of my top 10 milies' films. The sound track is amazing, so is the film, even if a few notes and frames are missing.

Astronomers? I thought those were wizards

Watching the 80s thing, then watching the original. I'll stick to the 80s thing.

Well you earned a subscriber :) great video dude!

The limitations of the past gave movies magic. If they are reimaginings with few call backs, then they might work

Nice and very interesting work! Just discovered your channel too, nice to see that your channel is growing fast, you deserve it.

i will not lie, i only clicled because i love that scene from the thumbnail but im glad i did

This is the second time today I see this weird moon movie being referenced, and I never saw it before

I still don't get people who hate on remakes despite a plethora of them being fantastic films. Ben Hur (1959) and Suspiria 82018) being amazing examples

the live action Alice and Wonderland was more of a sequel, not a remake. Which is why the film works while others don't.

Intro to body transition was smooth.

jeez that ending hits hard