8 Movie Remakes That Were Completely Unnecessary

5) The Planet Of The Apes

You can imagine how the story meeting went between Tim Burton and his creative team when he signed up to make the money-grab remake of Planet of the Apes. Short of ideas and constrained by a studio that didn’t want Burton to put any of his own personality into the movie (God forbid), the director would have been looking for a way to out-do an original that was never crying out for a straight-up remake in the first place.

The idea he came up with was a new twist: after two hours of Mark Wahlberg generally looking confused on a future Earth populated by intelligent chimps, Wahlberg’s astronaut (how? Just how?) travels back in time to regular old human Earth. And what does he find there, but a statue of Abraham Lincoln, only with a monkey in the place of the dead president.

This is what Burton came up with as an alternative to the original’s Statue of Liberty reveal – this was his one original idea. Obviously he didn’t sign up for a sequel, and neither did anybody else.