10 Directors Who Remade Their Own Movies

If a movie is a hit in any way, it’s a good bet that a remake will be released within a few decades. The remake-ification of successful movies happens even faster with non-American films, whose American remakes are churned out by Hollywood within a few years of the original’s release. Sometimes remakes are as good as the original, sometimes they’re even better, and sometimes they’re way worse, but it’s always interesting to see a new studio, new cast, or new director’s alternate spin on a familiar project.

There are times when the directors of the original films end up directing their own remakes. This can happen for a number of different reasons: Maybe a now successful director with a lot of industry power wants to revisit an old project that didn’t quite turn out the way they wanted. Maybe they’re a foreign director who always wanted to make a movie in America, and might as well remake their most famous film with Hollywood stars. Maybe they want the challenge of adapting an older story for a new audience. Or maybe the studio simply couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to do it.

In this list, we’ve collected ten directors who remade their own projects — either international directors who remade their movies in America, or American directors who remade their own movies just because. Some of these are straightforward remakes, some of them are remakes that expand on a smaller aspect of the original, some are better than their predecessors, some are worse, and one is exactly the same, shot-for-shot, changing only the members of the cast. It’s up to you to decide which of these remakes lives up to the hype, but it’s remarkable that all of these directors got to do the same thing more than once.

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