For basically as long as Hollywood has existed, it has loved to remake things. Some stories, like A Star Is Born, have been told over and over again for almost a century. Others have been remade, but have also become embedded in the way stories are told in Hollywood more generally.
Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai has been adapted into not one but two different westerns. But that undersells the influence it’s had on hundreds of films since. It tells the story of a band of samurai who assemble to defend a town from bandits. Of course, that set-up in and of itself was not invented with this epic. Seven Samurai is, in many ways, the prototypical example of this kind of story, though, and not least because it’s the very best version of it.
