Film remakes began to be rehabilitated by academia in the 1990s thanks to a few pioneering works such as Carolyn A. Durham's Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes (1998), or Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal's edited collection Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, published the same year. Many followed suit, including two crosscultural studies of Hollywood remakes of French films, Lucy Mazdon's Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (2000), and Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos's edited collection Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (2002). Constantine Verevis's Film Remakes (2006) cemented the discipline and showed the remake to be a textual, critical and industrial category, not unlike the film genre.

Since then, there have been numerous publications, not only on crosscultural remakes between Hollywood, Europe and East Asia (Wee 2013; Wang 2013; Smith and Verevis 2017; Smith 2016), but also within Europe (Cuelenaere et al. 2021), proving that it is not an exclusively Hollywood phenomenon, but one of global proportions, characterised by multidirectional transnational and transmedia flows. New findings within seriality studies demonstrate that the film remake is an element of larger forces at work. For Constantine Verevis and Kathleen Loock, it is involved in processes of cultural reproduction, and the practice of remaking is ‘one of several industrial and cultural activities of repetition (and variation) which range from quotation and allusion, adaptation and parody, to the process-like nature of genre and serial filmmaking’ (2012: 2). It is also often discussed together with other forms of cinematic repetition, continuation and renewal, such as sequels (Jess-Cooke 2009; Jess-Cooke and Verevis 2010), trilogies (Perkins and Verevis 2012) and reboots (Herbert and Verevis 2020), with which the remake overlaps. This has led Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer in their edited collection of essays (2016) to use the word ‘multiplicities’ as an umbrella term for texts that refuse to be confined or end, such as remakes, sequels, trilogies, reboots, spin-offs and cycles.

Just like the remake, British cinema was also in many ways up until that point a subject of scorn, not only for film scholars, but also for film practitioners – as seen, for example, in François Truffaut's widely-circulated proclamation that cinema and Britain are contradictory terms, or Ben Kingsley's statement that he loves British cinema like a doctor loves his dying patient (quoted in ‘British Cinema’: 344).