One of my favorite all-time movies is “John Carpenter’s The Thing” (buy) — which is a remake of the classic 1951 film “The Thing from Another World” (buy), both of which are based on the great novella “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. — so I don’t have a built-in bias against all movie remakes. But every day seems to yield fresh news about Hollywood do-overs, which makes me wonder if we haven’t reached a saturation point.

Case in point: Fox just released the poster for “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” which is due for a mid-December release.  I enjoyed Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” (buy) remake (well, up until the dreadfully schmaltzy ending), but I’m not sure I want to see Klaatu and Gort get an extreme CG make-over.

And the trend seems to be accelerating both in sheer volume and in speed.  “The Hulk” was a fun popcorn flick, but re-imagining a five-year-old film is a little crazy.  How far off are we from annual do-overs?

And if you Google any successful ’80s or ’90s genre film, there’s a good chance a remake is in the works, on the drawing board, rumored to be on the drawing board or is at least being discussed.

Given this frenzy of remakes and the slew of movie sequels (I won’t even get started on that topic), a lot of people conclude that Hollywood is simply out of ideas.

I don’t buy that.

In a Hero-With-a Thousand-Faces sense, yes, storytellers are always recycling.  But there are tons of new ideas and approaches out there (and, hopefully, a few here at Well Told Tales.) What’s lacking, IMHO, is the guts on the part of the movie studios to bet large sums of money on fresh stories.

Given media consolidation and the huge cost to create and market studio feature films, that’s unlikely to change any time soon.  But at least that — and  the new digital technology — gives independent filmmakers a chance to make their mark and gain an audience by creating new, original stories.

Hopefully, they’ll seize that opportunity.

And hopefully, the studio remakes won’t suck too much.