Remakes & Reboots are Usually Worse Than the Original, According to A Rotten Tomatoes Study

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There's going to be a lot of remakes coming out this year, starting with The Upside (a remake of the French film The Intouchables). We will also get to see Pet Semetary, What Men Want, Dumbo, Hellboy, Shaft, Aladdin, Child's Play, and Disney's live-action remake of The Lion King.

Where's the originality and fresh ideas? But are remakes and reboots such a bad thing? Now, Rotten Tomatoes has conducted a study that compiles the data of 400 remakes and reboots that have been released since 1978 and they compared the scores of the originals they were remaking to see if the remakes did better or worse.

Before we look at the results, here's the criteria Rotten Tomatoes set up:

"What is a remake? – It is a movie with the same story and title (for the most part) as an earlier film.
What is a reboot? – A reboot is a new start to an already created fictional world. For example, 2009's Star Trek is a reboot because it features familiar characters in a brand new adventure. It's not the same story twice.
374 Remakes and 43 Reboots
306 remakes and their originals both had Tomatometer scores
68 remakes had Tomatometer scores while their originals didn't (they weren't included in the first three facts)"

According to Rotten Tomatoes, it turns out that only 40 remakes or reboots of the 400 did better than the originals they're rebooting — that's less than 10%, and they include Ocean's Eleven, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Jungle Book, and True Grit among others. The study also discovered the Tomatometer averages of remakes (47%) and reboots (53%) are nowhere close to their originals (81% for films that have been remade, and 69% for films that have been rebooted).

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