Why Only 10% of Movie Remakes Beat the Original

Ten percent.

That's how often a movie remake or reboot actually out-scores the original with critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes' own analysis of its Tomatometer data. The review aggregator combed through more than 400 remakes and reboots released between 1978 and 2018, and the pattern held across four decades, every genre, and every studio: the new version almost always scores lower than the one it's replacing.

Why Do Remakes Score Lower Than the Original, Almost Every Time?

The gap is bigger than casual moviegoing gripes suggest. Remakes, films that redo the same story and usually the same title, average a 47% Tomatometer score, against 81% for the originals they're based on. That's a 34-point drop. Reboots, which restart a franchise with new actors and continuity rather than retelling the same plot, fare a little better: 53% average, against 69% for their source material, a smaller but still real 16-point gap. The Pop Insider's summary of the study puts a number on how lopsided the outcomes get: 84 of the films studied showed a 50-point or larger swing between the remake and the original.

Some of those swings are brutal on paper. 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street holds a 94% Tomatometer score; its 2010 remake sits at 15%. 1987's The Stepfather scored 86%; its 2009 version scored 11%. Horror is the most-remade genre in the data set, over 100 films, and it posts the lowest average of any category studied, just 39%. Only a third of all remakes in the sample earned a "Fresh" rating at all.

Are Reboots Rated Better Than Remakes?

Consistently, yes, and the study's own framing explains why. A remake retells a story audiences already know beat for beat, which invites direct, unforgiving comparison to a specific, beloved version. A reboot gets more room to build something that merely rhymes with the original: new actors, a new tone, sometimes a new decade's worth of technology and sensibility. Batman Begins and The Amazing Spider-Man count as reboots in the data; A Star Is Born counts as a remake. The 40 films across the whole sample that beat their originals lean toward that reboot side, along with a handful of remakes, Ocean's Eleven (82%, against 52% for the 1960 original), True Grit (96%, against 88%), and The Jungle Book (95%, against 86%), that pulled it off anyway.

The decade a remake was made in matters more than most viewers assume, too. Films redone in the 1980s scored an average of 57%, the strongest of the four decades studied; that average sank to 41% by the 2000s before recovering slightly to 45% in the 2010s. Disney's run of live-action reimaginings, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, is a large part of that late recovery, averaging 73% since 2015 even though the studio's earlier attempts, like The Shaggy Dog and Flubber, landed solidly "Rotten."

Has Any Remake Ever Won Best Picture?

Rarely, and the exceptions are old. Only three remakes have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture: 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty, 1959's Ben-Hur, and 2006's The Departed. Across roughly 90 years of Best Picture history, that's about 3.2% of winners, a rate that lines up almost exactly with the wider Tomatometer numbers. Hollywood keeps greenlighting remakes anyway, because even a mediocre one carries built-in name recognition that an original screenplay has to earn from a cold start. A studio betting on The Fog or House of Wax already knows roughly what opening weekend looks like; a studio betting on an unknown title is guessing.

That's the real explanation behind the pattern, and it isn't really about creative failure. The Tomatometer gap exists because remakes and reboots are financial hedges dressed up as movies, built to be recognized rather than discovered, and audiences and critics keep noticing the difference between the two.

It also helps explain a theatrical landscape that keeps investing in the moviegoing experience itself even as the scripts get more familiar. Studios lean on premium formats like curved IMAX screens and marketing built around nostalgia because the underlying title, not the story inside it, is doing the work of getting a ticket sold. A remake doesn't need a surprising script to fill a Friday night; it needs a recognizable poster and a theater worth showing up for. Even small rituals around a release, like the runtime creep behind movie credits that have grown from a single card to a ten-minute scroll, trace back to the same economics: franchises with built-in audiences can afford to let the ending run long because the people in the seats already showed up for the name, not the ending.

None of that means remakes are doomed by definition. The 40 exceptions in Rotten Tomatoes' data set prove a good one is possible; they just prove it's rare, and rare enough that betting on it isn't really the point. The point is the built-in audience, and on that metric alone, a remake rarely fails.