Here's what to do:

Why would someone do this to RoboCop? To quote a line from the film that's trying to defend the incredibly poor decision: "Make him more tactical ... let's go with black." Only it doesn't take half a fuckwit to know that A) navy blue is actually a more tactical combat hue, and B) seeing a blue bulky robot shooting scumbag caricatures with his "I'm a little teapot" firing stance is part of what RoboCop is. If it sounds too silly, don't remake the movie. Or better yet, consider that one of the more successful games of last year looks like this:

Sega/20th Century Fox

Alien: Isolation embraces the blocky Atari look of the original film instead of slickifying everything the way Prometheus does ... despite Prometheus being a prequel.

20th Century Fox
In the future, all information will be replaced with green text on black.

Embracing the camp of the original film while appealing to new audiences shows massive creative balls. It's part of why the J.J. Abrams Star Trek was such a hit. There's an instinct to modernize characters and technology lest they appear campy, unrealistic, or out of touch -- but does a movie like Red Dawn or Total Recall really benefit from a contemporary retelling? Frankly, the audience will forgive all the plot holes in the world if the film rubs them the right way. And a big part of that is tapping into the gooey nostalgia reservoir for 30-somethings and getting some neat retro cred for the 20-somethings. As the new, apparently enjoyed Godzilla remake proves: there's a charm in keeping the monster looking like its outdated counterpart, which is why the inevitable Jaws remake is going to suck without bad animatronics and problem drinking.

But the fact that these studio-folk don't automatically know to do this is indicative of a larger problem: most remakes appear to be developed by people with no idea why audiences liked the original. That's why ...

At its core, The Thing From Another World is a monster movie set in icy desolation that, according to reviews, doesn't take itself too seriously. John Carpenter's The Thing builds off the same setting and mood, but casts a belligerent wolfman and turns the monster into a Lovecraftian T-1000. Besides key visuals like a spaceship frozen in ice, murdered sled dogs, and the burning title effect, the remake is an extremely different beast about the same broad theme. It essentially is its own movie, iconic for being a gross-out practical effects tribute to Pod People ... something the 2011 prequel fails to embrace, opting for cheap CGI instead. Unlike what Carpenter understood about the draw of the original, the prequel completely changes one of the aspects that people like most about the '80s version.

20 years later, 20 times worse

A lot of adaptations and remakes get away with completely uprooting their source material, because they know which parts of it inspire fandom in the first place. You can interchange the time period and character ethnicities in Scarface as long as the story is about an immigrant's rise to power that is cut short by pride. Peter Jackson can make King Kong pull an American History X on three cartoon T. rexes because the original was received as a groundbreaking visual effects spectacle.

To be clear: nothing saves a movie if it's terribly written. But if remakes were required to throw out most of the original, then we'd live in a marginally better world. Just like if someone was forced to throw out 90 percent of their possessions, a filmmaker forced to change 90 percent of a story will have to figure out what's really important about the original.

What specific itch they are trying to scratch.

cnn.com,slashfilm.com
If it's in the title, that might be part of the 10 percent you want to keep.

Sometimes it is about retelling a compelling story like True Grit or The Departed -- but other times it's about matching the overall tone and aesthetic (see previous entry) while keeping a few iconic moments and throwing out the rest. The Evil Dead remake, for example, omits the character of Ash rather than futilely trying to follow in Bruce Campbell's footsteps. But it doesn't matter, because they keep that 10 percent of tone, imagery, and R-rated gore of the original. That's why, if all else fails, one of the simplest ways to determine if a remake is going to completely lose the audience is if it's a PG-13 version of an R film.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
"Bored or disappointed, you're coming with me."

Fuck you, 2014 RoboCop. You cost $100 million, and no one will ever love you. The RoboCop remake could have starred Paul Reubens in an undersea animal testing laboratory so long as it kept the same violence, tone, and message of the original. This, of course, goes both ways, as nobody goes to see Superman for its 9/11 symbolism and skull drowning sequences.

Warner Bros.
Bah bah bah, bah ... bah baaah! Bah bah, bah bah, bah baaaah!

But for all its father-murdering and desaturated neck-breaking, the bigger problem with Man of Steel is that it starts the series by having Superman save the entire world from terraforming aliens. At this rate he'll be uppercutting God by the third film ...

What's my point? Other than the fact that we're long overdue for a Jaws sequel (perhaps one focusing on Michael's daughter), my point is that sometimes a sequel doesn't need to escalate the scale of the events but rather the emotional gravity surrounding the characters. Or, hell -- just taking a break to focus on the characters would be fine too. I'll give you another example.

While Temple of Doom is by a noticeable margin the least enjoyed Indiana Jones film, it still has a much higher rating than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And yet, on paper it appears to be the odd film out. Indy has an adorable orphan sidekick that he lovingly endangers, and the story is very small-scale and follows an artifact that zero world powers have any interest in. With all the snake-eating racism and heart-yanking, it's unusually dark. Heck, this is the only film in the series that doesn't have the classic Indiana Jones credits sequence or feature our hero in the fedora and whip right away. Temple of Doom is the odd duck, and having an entry like this should be a requirement for every film series out there.

Lucasfilm
As should casting Jonathan Ke Quan.

You know what is just an OK movie? Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Sure -- it has explosions, Robert Redford, and Scarlett Johansson murdering dudes with her legs. But the whole shebang doesn't hold a candle to this one shot it briefly features at the beginning where Cap writes down everything he missed while frozen:

Marvel Studios
"Pogs"

After the first Captain America, The Avengers hastily throws the wing-headed hero into a new adventure while using his 1940s fish-out-of-water persona as a fun side joke. It makes sense for such a large-scale film, but coming into the second Captain America we had a chance to really explore the dynamic between a man who grew up before microwaves and an era where getting dinner boils down to shouting at your Xbox. Considering that we were just biding time until the next Avengers (which is subsequently just biding time until Civil War), Captain America 2 would have been a great time to do something completely unexpected and character-heavy. Instead, they put the fate of mankind on the chopping block once more, leaving the audience to wonder why the rest of The Avengers aren't helping to fight three giant hovercraft assassins. But at least it isn't as insanely dire as Thor 2's villains trying to squash the entire planet with elf portals.

Wouldn't it have been awesome if those sequels dialed it back to get to know the characters a little better? The only blockbuster sequels to consider this have been Iron Man 3, which completely screws with its own genre (thanks to writer-director Shane Black), and the Dark Knight trilogy, on account of the filmmakers having a concise exit strategy. Which reminds me ...

But failing all else ...