What Do Sequels, Remakes, and Adaptations Have In Common?

Alien: Romulus was my favorite film of 2024. I was never bored. The stakes felt real. And the performances were great, especially Cailee Spaeny’s. The film became more complex over time, but never dipped into boring exposition. It was scary as hell and beautifully lit. The specials effects were amazing and the action scenes were brutal. But one of my favorite aspects of the film was the beginning, in which we get to see what life is like for people on one of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s colonies. In all the other Alien films, you get a sense that Weyland-Yutani Corp. is bad news, but you never really get to see that world. You’re always on a ship or an alien planet where the Xenomorphs are hiding. But this time, we finally get to see what life on a corporate-owned colony is like for someone at the bottom of the ladder—and *SPOILER ALERT* it sucks. It's like a preview of what living on Elon Musk's Mars colony would be like. And gaining this perspective permeates the rest of the film. It changes the stakes. It deepens the characters’ motivations. And it really shows why the corporation is as much the enemy—if not more so—than the alien. In the cosmic battle for survival presented in the Alien films, there are two sides: the primal, predatory nature of the Xenomorphs and the authoritarian capitalism of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. And our heroes are stuck in the middle.

Romulus also managed to tie-in the first two films while still feeling like its own pocket story. In this way, it felt like a reboot, even though it was clearly a sequel, because it breathed new life into a series that had been uneven in quality for years, and did so with a whole new cast of characters. And while the themes in Romulus were present in the original Alien film, it still managed to find nooks and crannies yet to be explored without betraying what made the original great. This is a hard thing to pull off. Without naming names, not every sequel, remake, or adaptation that came out last year was as successful. But this necessary connection to a predecessor is what they all have in common.

Introducing new characters can be a great way to breathe new life into an adaptation or sequel. Take a film like Blacula, the campy, occasionally cringey sequel/adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, for example. It retains key elements of the novel while using them as a foundation to tell a tragic love story about loss, with a new vampire, Prince Mamuwalde, as its central character. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations did something similar by pulling Arwen out of the background and making her a more central character.

But some stories can be faithful adaptations and find originality in other places. Richard Linklater’s film A Scanner Darkly, for example, is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name. It beautifully captures the alienation, paranoia, and cognitive dissonance present in the book. And the rotoscope animation used throughout the film unifies surreal visuals with the mundane in a way that makes the two become indistinguishable from one another, so that the reality presented feels like a dream. Linklater remained faithful to the plot and characters of the book, while using the visual language unique to animation to bring something new to the table.

Sequels, adaptations, and remakes all owe fealty to their predecessor. But how much? And to which aspects of that predecessor? I think it is to the seemingly ineffable spirit of the original that subsequent stories own their allegiance, but that is all. Because a Copy-Paste rehash of the same story is not only a waste of time, but it often feels watered down or lifeless. While a story that changes essential aspects of the original ends up feeling like a betrayal.

Take Stephen King’s comments about Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, for example:

In the novel, The Shining, Jack Torrance is a difficult character, but he’s fundamentally a sympathetic character. And I always visualized him as a piece of metal that’s bent first one way and [then] the other by these malignant spirits, who basically want his son, because his son is a psychically powerful person. So I saw these all as warm characters, characters who were being threatened by forces from without, from ghosts, from real supernatural creatures. And the film is extremely cold. Stanley Kubrick saw the haunting as coming from Jack Torrance, from the Jack Nicholson character, whereas I always saw it [coming] from outside.

In my novel, the hotel burns. In Kubrick’s movie, the hotel freezes. It’s the difference between warmth and cold.

In his comments, King pinpoints the location of that spirit, the thing that derivative works owe their allegiance to. Part of it lives in the rules of the world, the fundamental world building, like King’s malignant forces coming “from without.” But another part, the most important part, in my opinion, lives in character, in Jack Torrance being a “fundamentally sympathetic character.” These are the things that, if changed in an adaptation, sequel, or remake, risk betraying that spirit. Everything else is fair game.