10 Series That Got A Much Darker Remake | Screen Rant
Whether it's film or television, production companies have a hard time letting things go - especially when a series is commercially successful. In an age when it's rare to see an entirely new idea, audiences are subject to regurgitations and variations on the same stories over and over.
Viewers have seen film sagas get rebooted multiple times a la Spider-Man, as well as TV continuations like Girl Meets World or How I Met Your Father. A more interesting phenomenon, however, is when writers decide to take a decidedly light-hearted tv show or film series and make them much darker, angstier, and more dramatic in tone for their remakes.
Sabrina The Teenage Witch is one of the best '90s TV shows to watch before Halloween. It's a classic, with teen witch Sabrina navigating her way through high school while having magic powers and getting guidance from her fun-loving aunt Hilda, no-nonsense aunt Zelda, and talking cat Salem.
The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina could not be any further from its source material. While the original show focused more on a lighter depiction of witches and magic, the remake goes straight to Satanism - an inaccurate connotation that has been harmful to the witch/Wicca community for many years. The tone is much darker and so is Sabrina's character.
DC has long been associated with darker and grittier takes on the classic superhero story, but it wasn't always that way. In fact, the original animated television show and the first few live-action films are full of bright colors, zany criminals, and funny one-liners.
When Christopher Nolan took over the Batman narrative, the tone and mood of the films completely changed. Instead of comic-style caricatures and superpowers, his characters were rooted in reality. With the evolution of how Batman is portrayed in different films, there are as many different styles of Batmen as there are zodiac signs.
Long before the controversial events of the 2022 Oscar awards, Will Smith was a hot topic in the media because of the reboot of his hit TV show, The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, that just premiered in February. Fresh Prince was a sitcom-style show best known for its many laughs and incredibly catchy title sequence song. While there were occasional emotional moments, Fresh Prince was primarily a comedy.
However, when the promotional ads for Bel-Air first dropped, viewers saw that it wasn't going to be a comedy at all. Instead, the show is a gritty drama that focuses more on Will's troubled past and difficult transition to life in Bel-Air. Even the pilot episode features a much darker reason for Will's relocation than a simple fistfight.
If Sabrina was the happy-go-lucky teen witch of the '90s, then the original three sisters of Charmed were her slightly angstier older sisters. While the show wasn't really a comedy, it also wasn't particularly dark in nature and focused more on drama and high fantasy.
The new Charmed, though, is significantly grungier than its predecessor. For starters, the original show's pilot follows the three sisters as they move back into the family home together. The new show begins with the traumatizing murder of two of the sisters' mother, and then it's revealed that they have a half-sister that they never knew about.
Whereas Tim Burton was responsible for the lighter Batman movies, it was the opposite case for the remake of Alice In Wonderland, which was originally intended to be an animated and live-action hybrid. When Burton took over for the official live-action version of the film, there was a much different atmosphere in the cinematic universe.
The Burton films take Wonderland and the creatures within it and make them a bit more dark and grotesque--a giant caterpillar is strange enough when it's a cartoon, but even creepier when designed with hyper-realism. The Queen of Hearts is also a bit more violent in the Burton retelling, making the series darker overall.
Riverdale really got the ball rolling with the "take a comedic/light show and make it edgy" movement in the film and television world. What originally started as a comic series and animated show titled The Archie Show was eventually turned into dark, overly-dramatic, sometimes fantastical teen drama.
The comics and cartoon followed a group of four friends that went to high school, grew up, and learned about life while navigating their relationships. It's hard to say what the live-action Riverdale is about. Part of it was a murder mystery and part of it was following mythical creatures and alternate universes. There are multiple love stories, crime bosses, cults, and many societal scandals between characters. Even hardcore fans of the show aren't quite sure what's going on half the time.
The animated Winx series already got a bit of a reboot when it became available in more countries. Fans of the fairy-centric show were thrilled to learn that the Winx Club characters were being brought to life for a new series about Bloom and her fairy friends as they fight off evil in amazing outfits.
Unfortunately for hopeful fans, the show didn't turn out exactly how they imagined it would and there were a lot of changes from the original Winx series to the new one. Instead of the fun bright colors of the world and characters in the first show, there was a realistic and muted tone to the show, in addition to more tension, drama, and arguments between characters.
Like the remakes of Riverdale and Charmed, The Hardy Boys remake starts off with a traumatizing murder of a character that's important to the main cast. The original books and series were fun and sometimes thrilling short-form mysteries, very much like Nancy Drew.
The new show is more of a long-form murder mystery that centers around the Hardy Boys and their father trying to find out more about the murder of their loved one. It's not as kid-friendly as the first series or books and delves much deeper into the mystery, drama, and supernatural horror genres.
As with some other shows that have been remade recently, Anne With An E's source material was a book series, and there have been quite a few live-action and animated renditions of the Anne Of Green Gables franchise over the years. However, none were quite as gritty as Netflix's Anne With An E.
The show was wildly successful and well-liked, with many Redditors lamenting when it was suddenly canceled, but it wasn't very similar to the first few retellings of Anne's story. The drama aspect of her relocation to Green Gables and interpersonal relationships, as well as the nefarious intentions of other characters are much darker than previous versions of the show.
Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go! are some of the most fun-filled animated superhero television shows. All of the imagery is bright and colorful, and the dialogue in both shows is hilarious, with a good amount of physical comedy written in.
In 2o18, a live-action version of the show was brought to HBO Max simply titled Titans. Fans were originally excited for the series, until set photos started to be released and it became clear that Titans was going in an entirely different direction than the previous shows. Instead of high-energy action, Titans is a darker, grittier show - not unlike the Batman movies.