You’ve Got Mail is a Jimmy Stewart movie with AOL.

Nora Ephron’s Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan rom-com updates Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Stewart and Margaret Sullavan fight in the shop and fall in love through anonymous letters. Same engine. Ephron swapped paper for email and a Budapest gift shop for an Upper West Side bookstore. Kathleen’s store is named The Shop Around the Corner on purpose.

A lot of movies people treat as originals work like that. The first version is older, foreign, cheaper, or just less streamed. The later film is the one that stuck.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Frank Oz’s musical is the version most people know. It comes from the 1982 stage show, which came from Roger Corman’s 1960 black-and-white film — shot in a couple of days on leftover sets. Jack Nicholson has a small part. The singing plant and the doo-wop chorus arrived later.

The Departed (2006)

Scorsese’s Best Picture winner remakes Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002). Undercover cop inside the mob, mole inside the police, same vise. Boston is new. The plot is not.

Two Kurosawa films Hollywood turned into Westerns

Yojimbo (1961) became Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964): a nameless drifter plays two gangs against each other. Leone followed it closely enough that he was sued.

Seven Samurai (1954) became The Magnificent Seven (1960): a village hires fighters to stop raiders. Same structure, different landscape.

12 Monkeys (1995)

Terry Gilliam’s time-travel film expands Chris Marker’s 1962 short La Jetée, told almost entirely in still photographs. The airport memory, the loop, the child who witnesses a death — that’s Marker.

True Lies (1994)

James Cameron’s Arnold spy comedy remakes the French film La Totale! (1991). Same joke: the wife thinks her husband is a dull office guy; he’s a secret agent. Cameron added the jets.

The Birdcage (1996)

Mike Nichols, Robin Williams, and Nathan Lane remake La Cage aux Folles (1978), the French-Italian farce about a gay couple performing straight for the future in-laws.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Soderbergh’s casino heist remakes the 1960 Rat Pack film with Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin. The 2001 cast is the one that stuck.

None of that makes the later film a ripoff. It just means “the original” is often the version you saw first. Some stories get a second draft with a bigger budget, a new country, or a different decade — and that draft is the one people remember.