Remakes have been all the rage in Hollywood for quite a while. Heck, in 2025 alone we got the remake of the cult 1980s horror movie Witchboard alongside live-action remakes of Lilo & Stitch, Snow White, and How to Train Your Dragon, following a January where the box office was dominated by Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake.
However, this has been going on essentially since the beginning of cinema, as proven by these 15 titles that you didn’t realize were remakes of older movies.
1. A Star is Born
‘A Star is Born’ (1954)Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
The debut of the Oscar-winning 2018 hit A Star is Born, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, led to an endless string of conversations like “this is a remake of the Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson movie from 1976, and that was a remake of the Judy Garland and James Mason movie from 1954.” But did you know that that was a remake of a 1937 movie starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March? Not to be outdone, that movie reworks the screenplay of 1932’s What Price Hollywood?, a Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman movie that debuted so early in film history that there was barely enough Hollywood to criticize in the first place.
2. His Girl Friday (1940)
‘His Girl Friday’ (1940)Credit: Columbia Pictures
Howard Hawks’ classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (which starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell) was extraordinarily influential, but if Hawks has seen further, it is because he stood on the shoulders of giants. The movie is actually a remake of the 1931 newspaper comedy The Front Page, which was in turn based on the 1928 play of the same name.
3. An Affair to Remember (1957)
The classic Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr romance An Affair to Remember, which was nominated for four Oscars, was directed by Leo McCarey. McCarey was remaking his own 1939 movie The Love Affair, which was itself nominated for six Oscars. Basically, McCarey invented a cheat code for Hollywood success.
4. The Last House on the Left (1972)
Wes Craven made his feature debut with the scuzzy grindhouse rape-revenge movie The Last House on the Left. While it is a brutal, grim exploitation movie, Craven’s background as an erudite humanities professor shines through in the fact that the movie is actually a remake of an Ingmar Bergman classic, the 1960 Swedish period drama The Virgin Spring.
5. Airplane! (1980)
Airplane!, which ranks as No. 10 on the American Film Institute’s list of the funniest comedies in history, is a broad parody of airline disaster movies like the Airport franchise and 1974’s Mayday at 40,000 Feet!. However, so many story elements, characters, and lines of dialogue were lifted directly from the 1957 movie Zero Hour! – including protagonist Ted Striker and the core storyline of a man chasing his ex onto a plane, only to be forced to take over flying when the crew gets food poisoning – that writer-directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker actually negotiated the rights to remake the original movie rather than relying on being protected by parody laws.
6. The Money Pit (1986)
The classic Tom Hanks comedy about a fixer-upper that needs infinitely more fixing than expected was based on the 1948 Cary Grant movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Grant had starred in enough remakes of his own by this point that it was about time the tables were turned.
7. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
Frank Oz’s comedy starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine as rival con men was remade as The Hustle (starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson) in 2019, but it was itself a remake, reinterpreting the classic Marlon Brando and David Niven movie Bedtime Story from 1964.
8. Always (1989)
Steven Spielberg’s dreamy afterlife drama Always was a remake of the 1949 Spencer Tracy drama A Guy Named Joe. It was Spielberg’s first-ever remake after previously helming either original hits (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark) or literary adaptations (Jaws, The Color Purple), though he later went on to helm another remake with the 2021 musical West Side Story.
9. Cape Fear (1991)
Martin Scorsese’s classic thriller Cape Fear has recently been remade into an Apple TV miniseries, but it was already a remake of the 1962 Gregory Peck movie of the same name adapting the John D. MacDonald novel The Executioners.
10. Major Payne (1995)
You might never expect Damon Wayans to be a natural fit to step into the shoes of Charlton Heston, but that’s exactly what happened with the 1995 comedy Major Payne, which was a remake of Heston’s 1955 movie The Private War of Major Benson.
11. Anastasia (1997)
There is a long history of fiction imagining what it might have been like if Anastasia Romanov had survived, and the 1997 animated Don Bluth musical Anastasia draws upon many of them. However, it is specifically inspired by the 1956 movie of the same name starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, to the point where they hired composer David Newman (the son of the 1956 movie’s composer, Alfred Newman).
12. Catch That Kid (2004)
‘Catch That Kid’ (2004)Credit: 20th Century Fox
In addition to giving Kristen Stewart an early lead role, this kid-led heist movie is a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretøsen.
13. The Lake House (2006)
Another surprise remake of a non-English movie is The Lake House, the hit time travel romantic drama starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. This reunion for the Speed stars couldn’t have happened without 2000’s Il Mare, the South Korean movie starring Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae and Colony’s Jun Ji-hyun of which it is a remake.
14. Last Holiday (2006)
Fellow 2006 title Last Holiday, which stars Queen Latifah as a woman who blows all her money on a lavish vacation after receiving a terminal diagnosis, is based on the 1950 British comedy of the same name (which was co-written by J. Lee Thompson, who directed the original Cape Fear!).
15. The Mechanic (2011)
In addition to being one of many Jason Statham action movies to spawn a franchise, The Mechanic is a remake of the 1972 movie of the same name directed by Michael Winner and starring his frequent collaborator Charles Bronson.
There are several runners-up for this list that you can read about on No Film School, including the Brad Pitt movie Meet Joe Black (which is based on 1932’s Death Takes a Holiday), the iconic erotic thriller Fatal Attraction (which is based on screenwriter James Dearden’s 1980 short film Diversion), and Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (which is based on the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name).
