We’ve started a new community thing: the Letterboxd Showdown. Each week we will announce a category, and during that week you will create lists of your best, favorite or preferred films within that category, ideally with notes to back up your choices. Your lists should have a minimum of five films.
You’ll tag your list with the weekly Showdown tag, and we will host all the lists on a fancy new Showdown page. At the end of each week, we will announce the Top 20 of that week’s category based on group consensus.
The first Showdown (Most Remarkable Directorial Debut) produced the consensus. (Did you catch the recent Tribeca Film Festival reunion for its 25th anniversary?)
And now… drum roll please… the second Letterboxd Showdown topic is: Favorite Remakes. (The tag is showdown:remake.)
We want you to list your favorite remakes, the films that blew you away as much as—or more than—the original, the films that updated the original in a thoughtful or insanely brilliant way, the films that transferred well across national borders, and survived translation across languages, the films that most cleverly rebooted a character or series, the films that most effectively took animation into live action and vice versa.
We take a fairly open view of what constitutes a remake and trust you do too. For example, there have been multiple film adaptions of a particular comic book or novel or stage play. Should the films that came after the first adaptation all be classified as remakes of the first film? Perhaps, perhaps not.For example, in the case of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women the Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version is its own creation and possibly not a remake. But you may beg to differ and you can always explain your choices in your notes.
What about reboots? Well, not all reboots are remakes, and vice versa. Ghostbusters (2016) would be a remake and a reboot. Again, you may beg to differ; tell us why in your notes.
As with last week, made their own lists to kick this Showdown off. From now on, we’ll announce each week’s category via Twitter and Facebook, so keep an eye out there at the end of each week.