Self-imposed rules:
(1) The original version has to be a film, not a TV series (ruling out Miami Vice, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, 21 Jump Street); however, the original can be a TV movie (e.g., L.A. Takedown). Relatedly, the remake can't be a TV miniseries (bye bye Mildred Pierce). My reasoning here stems from the film medium's natural narrative limitations imposed on the screenwriter.
(2) The remake must be equal to or better than the original. There are a number of good remakes that still fail to match the original: Sorcerer (this one is very close), 12 Monkeys, The Departed, Good Morning, A Fistful of Dollars, The Manchurian Candidate, Let Me In, Payback, the list goes on.
(3) It follows…
Self-imposed rules:
(1) The original version has to be a film, not a TV series (ruling out Miami Vice, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, 21 Jump Street); however, the original can be a TV movie (e.g., L.A. Takedown). Relatedly, the remake can't be a TV miniseries (bye bye Mildred Pierce). My reasoning here stems from the film medium's natural narrative limitations imposed on the screenwriter.
(2) The remake must be equal to or better than the original. There are a number of good remakes that still fail to match the original: Sorcerer (this one is very close), 12 Monkeys, The Departed, Good Morning, A Fistful of Dollars, The Manchurian Candidate, Let Me In, Payback, the list goes on.
(3) It follows then that I rule out a remake if I haven't seen the original. Casualties: The Merry Widow (1934), The Sun Shines Bright, The Beat that My Heart Skipped, and Hard to Be a God.
(4) The remake's faithfulness has to be more substantial than an "inspired by"-type adaptation. So no 35 Shots of Rum, Blow Out, or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Along the same lines, I eliminated reinventions of classic stories because they're not remakes of specific films, which means Kurosawa's Shakespeare adaptations are out, as is something like Blancanieves.
The Grey Area: subsequent film adaptations of novels where the screenwriter(s) worked from the source material rather than the first (or an earlier) film version (e.g., The Quiet American—both the 1958 and 2002 films are adapted from Graham Greene's novel). There are strong arguments on both sides, but I ultimately used the entirely unscientific "I know it when I see it" method. For instance, while Soderbergh didn't intend his Solaris to be a remake of Tarkovsky's, it is still generally referred to as such by the moviegoing public. I suppose this line of reasoning begins to crack for "remakes" whose "originals" are obscure, like Silence, but oh well.
The results:
