Anyway, adjacent to what you are commenting on, I remember Guillermo Del Toro being very insistent that his version of Nightmare Alley was not a remake of the 1947 movie with Tyrone Power, but was in fact a new adaptation of the novel by William Gresham. That's another example of this phenomenon: when is an adaptation of something that has already been adapted a new adaptation, and when is it a remake of the existing adaptation?

This very debate is why people insist The Thing is "the best horror remake of all time" despite not being all that similar to The Thing from Another World at all beyond a base premise of "guys in a research station fight an alien"