Remakes That Surpass Their Originals Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Most remakes are worse than what they replace. A Rotten Tomatoes study of over 400 remakes and reboots found that fewer than 10 percent earned a higher Tomatometer score than their source material — roughly 40 films out of more than 400. The average remake scored 47 percent against 81 percent for the originals it drew from.
"For every Fresh remake, there are two Rotten ones, which means the bad outweighs the good in the vast remake landscape." — Rotten Tomatoes Editorial, Yes, Remakes Do Suck — And the Tomatometer Proves It (2018)
The short list of remakes that cleared the bar
A small number of remakes are now regarded as improvements on their originals, or at minimum as films that stand fully independent of them. The list that recurs in every version of this discussion:
| Remake | Tomatometer | Original | Tomatometer |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Maltese Falcon (1941) | 100% | The Maltese Falcon (1931) | 67% |
| A Fistful of Dollars (1964) | 98% | Yojimbo (1961) | 97% |
| True Grit (2010) | 96% | True Grit (1969) | 90% |
| The Jungle Book (2016) | 95% | The Jungle Book (1967) | 86% |
| The Ten Commandments (1956) | 94% | The Ten Commandments (1923) | 83% |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) | 93% | The 1956 original | 97% |
| The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) | 91% | The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) | 86% |
| Freaky Friday (2003) | 88% | Freaky Friday (1976) | 71% |
| It (2017) | 85% | It (1990) | 57% |
| Ocean's Eleven (2001) | 82% | Ocean's 11 (1960) | 48% |
Aggregate scores don't always capture critical consensus
Philip Kaufman's (in Body Snatchers, as director) Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Carpenter's The Thing both carry Tomatometer scores a few points below their originals (93% vs. 97% and 84% vs. 89% respectively), yet both are routinely named as remakes that surpass their source films. The Tomatometer measures the percentage of positive reviews, not their intensity or the direction of long-term reassessment. A film that was contentious on release but became canonical can score lower than one that was warmly received and forgotten.
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers validates the entire concept of remakes. This new version of Don Siegel's 1956 cult classic not only matches the original in horrific tone and effect, but exceeds it in both conception and execution." — Variety (1978)
Robert Vaux, writing an extended analysis for CBR, assessed the scale of the 1978 film's achievement against the 1956 original:
"Kaufman's version tops it in almost every way, which is a remarkable accomplishment considering the masterpiece that preceded it." — Robert Vaux, CBR
The Den of Geek retrospective on the franchise identified Kaufman's specific method — he disassembled the original's components and rebuilt them for a new context:
"Director Philip Kaufman surprised the hell out of me, crafting an intelligent, beautifully shot and darkly atmospheric film." — Jim Knipfel, Den of Geek
Andrew Hatfield, reviewing the film for JoBlo, argued that its reputation still hasn't caught up to its quality:
"As remakes go, the 78 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is slept on far too often and ultimately one of the best out there." — Andrew Hatfield, JoBlo
Three horror remakes keep appearing together
Genre writing has settled on a recurring trio: Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Carpenter's The Thing, and Cronenberg's The Fly. All three were made within eight years of one another (1978–1986), all three took B-movie premises from the 1950s and rebuilt them as serious filmmaking, and all three are now considered superior to the films they remade.
"It belongs on a shortlist with Carpenter's The Thing, David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), and Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), of Hollywood remakes that surpass their predecessors." — Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review (2018)
The pattern they share: each director used the remake as a vehicle for a preoccupation that had nothing to do with the original.
- Kaufman — the pods as the death of 1960s individualism
- Carpenter — the alien as the impossibility of trust
- Cronenberg — the transformation as the body's betrayal of the self
The source material supplied the skeleton; the new film supplied the meaning.
Pauline Kael called the 1978 version the best of its kind ever made
Kael's review in The New Yorker treated the remake not as a genre exercise but as a major American film — the kind of endorsement that separated it from the usual remake conversation entirely:
"It may be the best movie of its kind ever made." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978)
The Letterboxd user Mark Cunliffe identified what separates a good remake from a bad one
Mark Cunliffe, in a Letterboxd review, framed the 1978 film's success in structural terms that apply to the entire category:
"A worthwhile remake whose very format and approach actually freshens, enhances and matures the ideas." — Mark Cunliffe, Letterboxd (2014)
The distinction matters. Most remakes reproduce a surface — the plot, the set pieces, the recognizable elements. The successful ones reproduce the underlying question and find a new answer. Kaufman's film asks the same question Siegel's does — what if the people around you were replaced? — and finds a new answer by changing the setting from a small town where everyone knows each other to a city where nobody does.
The remake that started the conversation was a comedy
Before the horror trio, the most-cited case of a remake eclipsing its original was Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), which gender-swapped the lead from The Front Page (1931) and turned a newspaper drama into a screwball comedy. The structural move — keeping the plot, changing the genre — became the template for every successful remake that followed.
"I saw His Girl Friday, and I thought that it was the best movie I ever saw." — Quentin Tarantino, The Hollywood Reporter (2016)
Annette Insdorf, in her monograph on Kaufman, identified the quality that sets his remakes and adaptations apart from lesser ones — the insistence on finding a visual language native to the new film rather than borrowing one from the old:
"Kaufman finds 'l'image juste' — the precise cinematic device appropriate to the story." — Annette Insdorf, Philip Kaufman (2020)
Take Machine
These are machine-generated readings — starting points you could support, argue against, or ignore entirely.
The three horror remakes work because each found a question the original couldn't have asked
Siegel's 1956 Body Snatchers asks whether your neighbors have been replaced — a Cold War question about visible conformity. Kaufman's asks whether they've been replaced and whether the replacement might be an improvement, a post-therapy question about whether feelings are worth the trouble. Hawks's The Thing from Another World asks whether institutional competence can contain the alien; Carpenter's The Thing asks whether competence matters when you can't identify who's infected. The 1958 The Fly asks what happens when a scientist's body is contaminated by accident; Cronenberg's asks what happens when the body betrays the self from within, turning transformation into a metaphor for disease and aging that the original's rubber-mask horror couldn't reach. In each case the remake found a question inside the B-movie premise that the original couldn't have, because it was made by different people at a different time for a different anxiety.
The pattern has a precise analogue in cover songs that become definitive by changing what the song is about. Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" is biblical unease; Hendrix's is apocalyptic fury — same lyrics, different song. Aretha Franklin's "Respect" turned Otis Redding's request into a demand. The successful remake, like the successful cover, doesn't execute the original better. It finds a different question inside the same material.
The failed remakes prove the rule by negative example
The 2007 Invasion moved the pods to Washington and turned the premise into a conspiracy thriller with a cure, modernizing the setting while reproducing the original's question without finding a new one; it scored 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho (1998) reproduced Hitchcock's compositions and editing with no new question to justify the exercise, scoring 37%. Both kept the how and missed the why.
The remake that reproduces form without finding new content is the cinematic equivalent of a pod — same surface, no inner life, and everyone can tell something is missing.
Sources
- Yes, Remakes Do Suck — And the Tomatometer Proves It — Rotten Tomatoes Editorial
- Every Remake That Got a Higher Tomatometer Than the Original — Rotten Tomatoes
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) — Deep Focus Review
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Variety
- 13 Film Remakes Better Than the Original — The Hollywood Reporter
- 14 Remakes That Are Better Than The Original — SlashFilm
- A Filmmaker With The Right Stuff: An excerpt from "Philip Kaufman" by Annette Insdorf — Eat Drink Films (2020)
- This Classic Donald Sutherland Movie Remains One of the Best Remakes of All Time — CBR (Robert Vaux)
- The Legacy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — Den of Geek (Jim Knipfel)
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Revisited — JoBlo (Andrew Hatfield)
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) review — Letterboxd (Mark Cunliffe, 2014)