![]() ![]() ![]() Our quantitative research shows the number of American remakes produced every year, their ratio in the total number of feature films produced annually, the percentage of remakes in the top most watched movies among the users of IMDb, as well as remake recency and percentage of remakes with titles recognizably linked to the original over the years. In our article, we adopt a diachronic quantitative perspective to analyse and interpret the available metadata on 986 Hollywood remakes produced between 19. Together with prequels, sequels, reboots and spin-offs, they have been often viewed as exponents of contemporary recycling culture, symptomatic of Hollywood’s recent creative exhaustion and commercial risk aversion. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement.Īmerican film remakes have enjoyed growing academic attention over the past 50 years. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning’s Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley’s Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre.
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