There are several great Japanese movies throughout history, and many of them have received American remakes, with Hollywood adapting Eastern stories for Western audiences. In films like 2025’s Highest 2 Lowest, American directors reinterpret Japanese themes and reimagine the characters to offer the story to a fresh audience.
These Western remakes offer everything from dramas and action movies to horror films, and there are even some actual Westerns in the mix as well. In many cases, the American films replace the yakuza with the mafia and the samurai with cowboys, but they keep the same themes. From classics to modern releases, there are great remakes.
10
The Grudge (2004)
The Grudge came out in 2004, a remake of the 2002 Japanese horror movie Ju-On: The Grudge. This was an era in Hollywood where studios were remaking countless Eastern films from Japan and South Korea, and a few rose to the level of masterpieces on their own. The Grudge was second only to The Ring in this category.
The most interesting thing about this Western remake of a Japanese horror movie is that it didn’t change the location. Instead of transplanting the story to America, this remake featured a family from America relocating to Japan for a job. The ghostly vengeful spirits then set their sights on this American family.
The Grudge received poor reviews, but it was a mᴀssive success for audiences, bringing in a box office total of $187.3 million. While the Japanese movie evolved into a franchise, the American version ended at one film, but then received a remake itself in 2019.
9
Django (1966)
Django is a cult classic spaghetti Western movie that is a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. The original film was about a rōnin who arrives in a troubled small town and helps the people there overcome two crime bosses who have driven the town to live in fear.
This isn’t an American remake, but rather a Western remake, produced in Italy and Spain. Franco Nero stars as Django, a man who is introduced in one of the most memorable openings, with Django wearing a Union uniform and dragging a coffin before he saves a prosтιтute from bandits.
Clearly, this remake takes the idea of a rōninhelping a small town and replaces it with a rough-around-the-edges version in Django. It started a “Mud and Blood” trilogy for director Sergio Corbucci.
8
Last Man Standing (1996)
In 1996, director Walter Hill (The Warriors) helmed another remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. This one took the samurai original but didn’t turn it into a cowboy movie. Instead, this remake was a neo-Western gangster film, starring Bruce Willis as a wanderer who sets out to save a small border town.
Like the original movie, Willis stars as a dangerous man who arrives and does some bad things, but is someone who eventually realizes he has a chance to be something more. Unlike A Fistful of Dollars, which was unauthorized, Kurosawa gave his blessing for this American remake.
The movie was a box office bomb and received poor reviews. Still, it is much better than its reputation suggests, with Bruce Willis delivering an excellent performance in a dark reinterpretation of the Japanese classic.
7
Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
Highest 2 Lowest has a lot of big names involved in the original and remake. The original movie was an Akira Kurosawa film called High and Low, which starred Kurosawa’s regular actor, Toshirō Mifune. He plays a businessperson who wants to buy out his company only to end up involved in a kidnapping scheme.
The remake is directed by Spike Lee, with Denzel Washington in the lead role. The story is mostly the same, but Lee takes the story and moves it from a shoe company to a music label, using a more familiar American insтιтution rather than a corporation that wouldn’t play as well in today’s world.
The remake received fantastic reviews, with an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, with praise going to Lee and Washington for their reinterpretation of the Kurosawa classic.
6
Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009)
Hachi: A Dog’s Tale is a 2009 American drama starring Richard Gere. The story follows the life of a dog named Hachi who belonged to a professor named Parker Wilson. The story is told by Parker’s grandson, and it follows the dog after Parker dies, and the dog is unable to grasp the loss and continues to wait for his beloved owner to return.
The movie, a tale of loyalty and love, is a remake of the Seijirō Kōyama drama Hachikō Monogatari, which tells the true story of Hachikō, a loyal Akita dog that waits for its owner, Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, to return from work nine years after Ueno’s death.
This is a loyal remake of the original, and the Western remake doesn’t change much. The remake received mixed to positive reviews.
5
The Ring (2002)
In 2002, the best Western remake of an Eastern horror movie was released when Gore Verbinski remade the 1998 Japanese horror movie Ringu. The original film, directed by Hideo Nakata and based on the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, was about a cursed videotape that would kill anyone who watched it after seven days.
Ringu was a huge success and spawned a franchise, including sequels and prequels, marking a renaissance in Japanese horror films. It also revolutionized Hollywood, which began to remake an increasing number of Asian horror movies. The best American remake in this era was easily The Ring.
The Ring was a huge success, both critically and commercially, while staying true to the original story, including the depiction of the ghost girl, Samara. With truly terrifying scares and great ghost design, The Ring helped usher Hollywood horror movies into a new era.
4
Kill Bill (2003-2004)
Quentin Tarantino had a lot of influences behind his masterpiece films in the Kill Bill duology. He pulled from kung fu movies, exploitation flicks, spaghetti Westerns, and several other genres he grew up loving. However, Kill Bill is also a loose remake of the Toshiya Fujita Japanese film, Lady Snowblood.
While Tarantino never listed Kill Bill as an adaptation of that masterful action movie, the similarities are striking. Lady Snowblood is about a woman who seeks vengeance on the people who raped her mother and killed her half-brother, and it is often told out of chronological order.
Tarantino deserves credit for taking the basic idea and adding enough changes to make the story his own, but it is clearly influenced by the story from this Japanese masterpiece.
3
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
John Sturges took the Akira Kurosawa masterpiece, Seven Samurai, and changed the rōnin into a cowboy, and moved the action from Japan to the American West in The Magnificent Seven. What resulted was a movie that became just as beloved as the original Kurosawa epic.
It was the perfect transition, too, as many critics felt that Kurosawa used many tropes from the Western genre in Seven Samurai, which made it an ideal film to bring back as a Western. Both movies follow seven warriors who defend a village from dangerous bandits.
Seven Samurai is considered one of the best Japanese films ever made, and it remains the most influential samurai epic in the country’s history. The Magnificent Seven is a little less regarded, but it is still considered one of the Western genre’s best ensemble films.
2
Star Wars (1977)
The first Star Wars movie is not credited as a remake of any previous film. However, it is a very clear reimagining of an Akira Kurosawa samurai movie from the 1950s. While Lucas claims he wasn’t trying to remake The Hidden Fortress, it is impossible not to see the similarities and comparisons between the two.
The Hidden Fortress follows a pair of hapless peasants, Tahei and Matashichi (R2D2 and C3PO), who end up meeting a famous Akizuki general named Makabe Rokurōta (Obi-Wan Kenobi). Makabe brings them along as he tries to bring hold to help Princess Yuki (Princess Leia), a woman in hiding.
The princess needs to retake her land from the evil overlords who stole it from her family. Both movies follow the story from the POV of minor characters (the peasants in one and the robots in the other). Both movies are also more concerned with the regular people on the ground rather than the Jedi or high-ranking generals.
The story really takes a turn when Luke Skywalker starts his journey as an X-wing pilot, but the setup and characters easily owe a lot to The Hidden Fortress.
1
Fistful of Dollars (1964)
A Fistful of Dollars is easily the best Western remake of a Japanese film, even though it never credited the movie it was remaking. Sergio Leone released A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, a spaghetti Western that was clearly a straight remake of the Akira Kurosawa film, Yojimbo.
Unlike later movies, like Last Man Standing, which made its remake status clear, Leone just made a movie that copied Kurosawa’s story without crediting the master. As a result, Toho sued Leone, who ignored the initial lawsuit and finally agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
Despite the controversy, A Fistful of Dollars is a Western movie masterpiece. It made Clint Eastwood a major star and was the first part of the Dollars Trilogy, which was followed by For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
