What's with all the Hollywood remakes?

Hairspray, which opens in theaters today, is a remake of a remake—it's based on the Broadway musical that got its inspiration from John Waters' 1988 cult film. Although this most recent version of Hairspray does offer some new tricks (not the least of which is John Travolta in drag), the nature of its recycled-ness has many critics comparing the movie with its former incarnations. In 2005, Gabriel Snyder examined why studios have become so keen on remakes. That article, "Been There, Done That," is reprinted below. We guess self-plagiarizing isn't limited to Hollywood.

Hollywood studios have been turning increasingly inward for inspiration. Megaplexes were deluged with remakes this year, with three retreads rolling out in the last nine days alone—King Kong, The Producers, and, yesterday, Fun With Dick and Jane.

It caps off a year when the major studios have delivered moviegoers 14 remakes of their own films, up from just four in 2000, according to movie research firm Nielsen EDI. These have ranged from the well-known, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to the obscure, like Yours, Mine and Ours, based on a 1968 Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda film.

That's not counting movies poached from other countries: Dark Water starring Jennifer Connelly was based on a Japanese horror film by Hideo Nakata; the Drew Barrymore-Jimmy Fallon romantic comedy Fever Pitch was based on a Nick Hornby memoir that was turned into a film in the U.K. eight years ago. Nor does it count the abundance of TV shows that found their way onto the big screen this year, like Aeon Flux, Serenity, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Bewitched.

What's the attraction of remakes, and how do they get made? King Kong, The Producers,and Fun With Dick and Jane are each representative of a different kind: Those fueled by a powerful cheerleader; those riding on the coattails of a previous success; and those that are repurposed simply because the studio can.

As King Kong director Peter Jackson has recounted on his publicity circuit, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 original King Kong is the reason he wanted to make movies. As the filmmaker behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy (worldwide gross $2.9 billion), Jackson has the closest thing to a blank check in Hollywood. King Kong became his pet project. Still, no amount of power helps if a filmmaker or a studio doesn't have the rights to a film.

Warner Bros. learned that the hard way when it didn't secure the remake rights on Dukes of Hazzard. A producer of the little-known 1975 film Moonrunners sued Warner Bros., saying that when he sold the studio his film's TV rights to make the Dukes of Hazzard series, he never granted any film rights. Last June, less than two months before Jessica Simpson was due to shake her short shorts in theaters, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the studio from releasing and marketing the film—even ordering that all copies be impounded. Since Warner had already spent more than $100 million on production and marketing, the studio quickly agreed to settle for a reported $17.5 million in order to release the film on time.

As it happens, the character of King Kong is in the public domain, which means he's anybody's for the taking. Likewise, Steven Spielberg had an easier time making War of the Worlds because the original H.G. Wells story is in the public domain.

When remake rights get tangled, it can stop a project cold. Take, for instance, The Hobbit, which was adapted into a cartoon in 1977. While New Line, which made Jackson's Rings films, owns the Hobbit movie rights, MGM has rights to distribute any Hobbit film. MGM's distribution rights are left over from a previous movie-rights purchase from J.R.R. Tolkien that the studio sold long ago. New Line doesn't want to share its profits with MGM (now owned in part by Sony), and of course Sony won't let New Line make the movie without getting its cut. Thus, the convoluted stand-off continues.

The Producers is an easier sort of remake to explain. Mel Brooks' original 1968 film starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel was a straight comedy, with precious few musical numbers. In 2001, Brooks turned it into a record-setting Broadway musical, this time starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick.