9 Sci-Fi Remakes So Bad, They Ruined the Originals
There's a special kind of pain that only bad remakes can deliver.
You sit down hoping for a fresh take, something bold or at least respectful—and instead you get two hours of CGI sludge, lifeless dialogue, and some studio exec clearly trying to cash in on a brand they don't understand.
And sci-fi gets hit harder than most. These are movies that built cult followings, reshaped genres, inspired entire generations—and then got dragged out of the vault and reanimated into something that looks like it was designed by a marketing algorithm. The vibe's gone. The soul's gone. Sometimes even the story is gone.
That's what this list is. Not just bad movies. These are remakes that didn't just flop—they left a stain on the original. They're the reason younger viewers think that version is what the franchise was all about. They turned classics into punchlines.
Every one of these disasters somehow took a sci-fi concept that worked, that people loved, and managed to strip out everything interesting. The tone, the characters, the pacing—wrecked. And in a few cases, the original got buried so deep under the remake's failure, it actually started to disappear from pop culture altogether.
So if you're wondering how to ruin a legacy in under two hours, these movies are the blueprint. Nine sci-fi remakes so bad, they didn't just miss the mark—they shot the original in the back on the way out.