Daily Inspiration Quote by Alex Winter

Winter’s take lands because it’s both casual and heretical in a culture that treats “remake” like a four-letter word. By singling out Carpenter’s The Thing as the rare upgrade, he’s not just defending one movie; he’s arguing for a standard: remakes aren’t automatically cynical, they’re guilty until proven artistically necessary. The phrasing is telling. “Certain” narrows the claim to a curated exception list, a preemptive eye-roll at Hollywood’s assembly line. Then he drops the mic with a canonized example that film people love to deploy because it’s objectively hard to argue with.

The subtext is a plea for discrimination, not nostalgia. The Thing (1982) doesn’t win by polishing the original; it wins by reimagining what the story is for. Hawks and Nyby’s 1951 version is clean, brisk, and Cold War tidy: the monster is otherness made literal. Carpenter’s remake turns that into an anxiety machine about infiltration, mistrust, and bodies that can’t be trusted - a horror vocabulary that fit the early AIDS era and late-’70s paranoia. Same premise, different wound.

Coming from an actor best known for pop-cultural time capsules (Bill & Ted) who later moved into directing documentaries, Winter is also staking out taste credibility: he’s fluent in fan discourse, but he’s reaching for a principled position. The line flatters cinephiles while quietly challenging purists: if you want to complain about remakes, at least admit the ones that justify their existence by changing the temperature of the world.