Movies are being made to mitigate risk. Take a polar thing and just do that again, that'll suck people in right???

God forbid they do something new and interesting with the material, that can't possibly work.

The only time I can think of where a remake ended up working out was with the recent planet of the apes movies. Where, you know, they took the premise and did something new and interesting with it. But even THEN, there was a completely different remake that failed to innovate outside of the last few minutes and those were confusing are best.