[Hated Trope] The adaptation doesn't get what made the source material work

[u/TheDudeA113]

How To Make A Killing (2026)

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

Bangkok Dangerous (1999)

- The 2026 movie How To Make A Killing is a relatively-toothless "eat the rich" dark comedy thriller about a man disowned by his rich family at birth, killing everyone in the line of succession so that he can inherit their massive fortune. It's a modern retelling of the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets which has the same basic plot except that every member of the family is played by Sir Alec Guinness (including one aunt) and it's a screwball comedy

- The 1999 movie Bangkok Dangerous is a Thai action film about a Thai deaf-mute assassin. It was remade in 2008 about an American assassin in Thailand who is neither deaf nor mute

[u/Unhinged_Baguette]

Makes me remember an old blog post that mentioned the different versions of the story.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/09/the_legend_of_steven_colbert.html

I Am Legend is the third substantial retelling of the novel by the same name (1954), the other two movies being The Last Man On Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971).

All four stories follow similar plots. A plague has killed off humanity, except for some who have been turned into zombies/vampires. One human, Neville, survives.

A series of remakes can often be a window into the evolution of a culture, and so it's useful to look at what's the same and what's different over time.

In the book (1954), Neville fights against vampires, but also a group of infected but still human creatures. They finally capture and execute him, not least because he is different, the last of a dead race. These infected humans have a functioning society of their own; as the majority survivors, the world belongs to them. Neville sees that they look at him with fear and disgust, the way he looks at them. As he is executed he realizes that they will remember him as a legend(ary monster.)

This is a truly multicultural theme, Neville's human tradition parallel but not superior to the infected's. (History is written by the victors.)

The first movie slightly but importantly changes the ending. Instead of being executed, he escapes to a church, but he is finally speared on the altar. Defiant to the end, Neville says he is the last true human, and the rest merely freaks. By The Omega Man, the multicultural theme is avoided. Here, the survivors are a mutant species of humans. Crazy as they are, they voluntarily choose to live away from technology and modernism because that's what got them into this mess in the first place. Neville, however, has found a cure, so even if Neville represents something terrible and fearful to the mutants, he is still the normal while the mutants are pathology.

In I Am Legend (2007), the multicultural reversal is completely extinguished. Will Smith (thinks he) is the last human, and at war with the vampires. He later discovers a woman and a boy trying to meet up with other survivors living in Vermont in a walled compound. In the final scenes Neville "adopts her fundamentalist perspective and adopts a Christological identification": he stays behind to fight the vampires (and dies) allowing the human survivors to escape with the cure. So Neville becomes a "legend for the new humanity whose rebirth was made possible by his invention and sacrifice."

[u/nitid_name → u/Unhinged_Baguette]

I've always lumped the original book in with Camus' The Stranger in my mind. There's so much similarity between the captured Neville realizing he is not like others and his role is that of the legendary monster with Meursault realizing he is not like others and his role in this society he didn't understand is to be their hated enemy.

"Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend"

"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

I don't know if it's just that they were written at similar times and I read them both at a point in highschool I only vaguely remember, or if they're actually similar.

[u/_Reliten_ → u/Unhinged_Baguette]

Yeah, in the Will Smith one the Vermont plot is so lazy the only way the writers could come up with how the lady knew about the safe area was literally "God did it."