Inclusiveness and creativity....
There's a meme going around that lauds the new gender bending Ghost Buster's movie as something for little girls to look up to (for heroic inspiration) and that is not for white guys, because apparently they've had the original and 2 subsequent sequels. The takeaway is that little girls can't look at the original characters and find them something
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There's an entire sub-section of anime that can be classified as "Inspired by Journey to the West;" some are really good. :D
The Magnificent Seven is a hugely popular western because, yeah, it's a translation-- and if you love the Seven Samuri but not westerns, a lot of it won't appeal-- but it's a translation that latches on to the classic western themes that inspired the original movie. Disney's adaptations (Ooh! That word works better than "retelling/imagining") are a good example of this-- sometimes they are simply a musical adaptation of the original story, sometimes they're Hamlet with Lions and a happy ending, and sometimes they're more like someone heard the story, remembered some favorite parts, and wrote a movie based on that.
The "inspired by" stuff tends to be a lot better because it's more likely to make sense-- people aren't cogs; having a ranch-raised 35 year old, 5 foot tall, UK-area ancestry married mother of four take the place of a 16 year old orphan male who's black, raised in a small city, and six foot by six foot without being done growing yet. Replacing either with a mid to late 20s female model of Asian ancestry would be another big change. If they're doing a remake and just plug the checklist into the slots, it hurts the story.
Heck, even fan fiction gets it better than most of these movies-- they go "Hey, what if My Favorite Character was a chick? How would that change the story?" They actually think about it, rather than going "This existing character is widely admired; let's make them (different group)."
This especially sucks because it makes it so that changes that turn out awesome-- where they pick an actor who can BE the role, and to heck with ancestry-- are met with unneeded resistance; I know my reaction to hearing that King Pin was going to be black was negative, because that usually means "they chose the character they thought was the most useless and made them a token." This especially sucks when the character wasn't useless, because that means the guys doing the writing don't care about the story they're telling.
A more famous example of an adaptation that worked great is Nick Fury.
An example of shoe-horn it in where I'm not sure it isn't trolling is that petition to make Elsa of Frozen a lesbian. (Seriously? Someone looks at a gal who nearly killed her sister twice, on accident, and then dang near destroyed her entire country, and goes "ah, she is an emotional mess that puts everyone around her in deadly danger, probably has serious mental issues, of course she'd have a girlfriend!" and wants to accuse those who object of a hatred of homosexuals? I half expect a secondary one for Flynn Ryder to be gay, or at least bi. Let's see what other bad stereotypes can be wedged in for changing characters.)
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