Studio executives have grown more than a little remake-happy in recent years. In 2019 alone, remakes of films including “Shaft,” “Dumbo,” “The Upside” and “Aladdin” have all arrived in theaters, with the live-action remake of “The Lion King” set to arrive next week.
The executives’ logic has been simple: in a world of content overload, consumers turn out for the familiarity of a remake. While critics don’t tend to be terribly fond of these new takes, consumers supposedly like them.
Fully one-third of Disney’s 2019 releases are devoted to live-action remakes of animated features. And many more remakes are in the development pipeline, from “Clue” (Disney’s Fox unit) to “Clueless” (Paramount).
But a new study suggests audiences don’t really like remakes either. Or, at least, an overwhelming number of people prefer the original.
The study quantifies an aspect of Hollywood — remake sentiment — that is often talked about only in nebulous terms. In the process it has implications for studios, which may be greenlighting movies their audiences will embrace only tepidly.
And, soon enough, maybe not at all. The studios might be setting themselves up for fatigue and a box-office backlash.
“We may be hitting a peak with remakes. And I suspect we may (soon) hit a decline,” said Bruce Nash, a box-office expert with the site The Numbers.
Spearheaded by researcher James Barnes of the company Verve Search (it helps companies boost search) and backed by online betting site Casumo, the survey found that audiences compared the remake unfavorably to the original more than 90 percent of the time. That’s more often than even critics, who are famously remake-averse.
To conduct the study, researchers looked at the percentage of positive assessments from audience members on the movie-and-television site IMDB for more than 100 remakes. They took those scores, then compared them to the same measure for the original, noting the swing up or down. (IMDB users can rate movies both old and new.)
The researchers then did the same for Metacritic scores, regarded as the most reliable indicator of how reviewers felt about a movie.
The study found that fully 91 percent of remakes drew a less positive audience score than the original. Among critics, the remakes received a lower Metacritic score just slightly less frequently — 87 percent of the time.
One of the biggest dips between the remake and the original was for a film that just came out: “Dumbo,” Disney’s live-action remake of the animated classic about a circus elephant with ears big enough he can fly. The new version received just a 51 Metacritic score, compared to 96 for the 1941 original.
