Because they don't want to risk investing time and money in developing a new property. They perceive it as much safer to just use something that has a "built-in" audience, either due to name recognition or because they think people will check it out because of nostalgia.
New innovations in technology, and societal and cultural changes all contribute to the desire to update classic movies, with some remakes better than the original. Remakes work best when they're not trying to merely replicate the original, but instead, offer something new to it.
“[Audiences] know what that is, and they want to see more movies in it,” Hansen said. “As long as there's an appetite, people will go see it.” Hansen also said original movies typically make less money at the box office than franchise movies, making them a bigger risk for studios to produce.
Why does Hollywood keep bringing back old franchises?
Legacy sequels are the "soft open" of the film world. Instead of rebooting a film completely with a cast of new faces, they bring back characters from the original film or franchise. This serves multiple purposes, but the most important being that it brings original fans back to the screen for the new movie.
The inevitable success of remakes allows film studios to take risks when producing original films. If an original film like “Tomorrowland” does poorly in the box office, the studio does not have to worry about financial loss as long as the profit their other films earn counteracts an original film's failure.
“By nature, I'm an experimenter,” Walt was quoted as saying, “To this day, I don't believe in sequels. I can't follow popular cycles. I have to move on to new things. So with the success of Mickey, I was determined to diversify.”
“[T]o have something that you feel very fondly towards, and to see it be manipulated or changed in often-cynically-motivated ways is very irksome,” Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist, had noted, explaining people's anger at remakes of their favorite childhood movies.
Even in comparison to major releases seen today, hundreds of more films were made and released in the 1930s. Genre films were big hits, especially westerns, gangster and crime movies, and musicals. The Golden Age of Hollywood began to falter by 1948 and fully came to an end by the 1960s.
They want to have a conversation with people they trust, people who understand what they're doing.” There's an argument to be made that it feels like movies are getting longer because studios now favor the overstuffed, spectacle-fueled films that perform better in theaters.
Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house." Meanwhile, the studios could earn money by recycling the film for their silver content.
Actually, as the earliest known film remake to date, Playing Cards is the 1896 remake by George Melies, a French director who was renowned for his achievements in the silent film era. The original film of the same name was produced by a man named Louis Lumière and was released earlier in the same year.
Economics dictated shooting closer to the threshold of the illusion, and most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up: Charlie Chaplin.
Hollywood's Golden Age finally came to an end due to two main factors: antitrust actions, and the invention of television. The iconic Hollywood sign. Reprinted from Hollywood 1940 – 2008 by Marc Wanamaker (pg. 19, Arcadia Publishing, 2009).
It then became characteristic of American cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, between roughly 1927 (with the advent of sound film) to 1969. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide.
You see, the Golden Age of Hollywood was a time between the '20s and '60s when the studio system ruled, meaning the Big Five studios controlled the film industry. These companies created stars like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, but due to strict contracts, they controlled them in many ways too.
1. Marvel Cinematic Universe. The overall highest-grossing franchise by almost $6 billion, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an immortal giant that towers over all other franchises mentioned here.
Dallas tops the scale at $9.2 billion, putting the Cowboys more than $1.5 billion ahead of the next most valuable team (the Golden State Warriors, at $7.56 billion). The Cincinnati Bengals were the least valuable NFL franchise, at approximately $4 billion.
One school of thought suggests that the remake genre is so pervasive because for the production companies, actors and brands involved in the films, it's a safe bet. You don't have to drum up interest in a new concept, story or character because there's a ready-made audience there for the taking.
Old movies were shot on either 35mm or 70mm film reel. These reels were analogue. Analogue gives you the ability to go back to it and 'transfer' it to what ever technology is available at the time.
Hollywood film studios are only interested in making money, and they produce remakes because they think enough moviegoers are interested in seeing the remake for it to earn a profit for the film studio. Moviegoers are usually entertained rather than killed by remakes.
