The Lion King

A shot-for-shot remake in photoreal CGI, with the same story, the same script in long stretches, the same songs and James Earl Jones back as Mufasa. The interesting part is what the technique costs. Realistic lions cannot make the expressions the 1994 animation used to carry the performance, so the same lines land differently; that trade is most of what was written about the film. Recorded as a remake rather than an adaptation because it retells the same work in the same medium.

The production has said it outright, and said it early: once the story was a prince, a murdered king and a usurping uncle, the team began calling it Hamlet with lions and used the play to work out what was missing. What is directly Shakespeare's: the uncle who kills his brother for the throne, the son who flees rather than acts, the father who returns to demand that he does, the court corrupted under the new king, and the return to reclaim it. What is not: the ending. Hamlet dies and Denmark falls to a foreign army; Simba lives and the land recovers, which is the change that makes it a children's film. The two comic attendants are usually credited to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by way of Stoppard.