"Remake" is a Hollywood executive's favorite word.

Almost as long as movies have been made, there have been directors, producers and writers clamoring to reboot the hell out of everything that's ever hit theaters.

Why? Because sometimes, it really works. Without the original 1932 Scarface, audiences wouldn't have the later 1983 masterpiece starring Al Pacino. The same goes for Ocean's Eleven, The Maltese Falcon, Some Like It Hot and other Hollywood gems. Dig deep into movie history, and you'll find that many successful films are actually just polished versions of celluloid past.

Lately, it seems like there's been a growing trend of remaking big-budget movies that feel like they were just in theaters. Remember the whiplash you felt when Spider-Man got the reboot treatment with Andrew Garfield, just five years after Tobey Maguire's star turn? The same goes for the two different Hulk movies audiences had to sit through in 2003 and 2008.

According to data blog The Droid You're Looking For, 122 remakes have been theatrically released between 2003 to 2012. The average critic score of all these films on Rotten Tomatoes? A middling 46%, whereas the original films had a median score of 78%. Critical prestige is low, but the box office? It's overflowing. The total box office gross of all these remakes was a startling $12 billion.

"If you do it well, you’ll have access to a gold mine! And I’m pretty sure studio bosses like gold mines," says Gitesh Pandya, editor of Box Office Guru, in an interview with Mashable.

Studios make back-to-back remakes for a laundry list of reasons, chief among them security and bankability — movies that were past hits are easy financial wins for the future. There's also a guaranteed built-in audience and a better chance for publicity when it comes to familiar films. Now, more than ever, studios are "becoming dependent" on past franchises, Pandya says.

The previous material doesn't even have to be great in order to get a reboot green light, because "the majority of sales will come from international markets." Global audiences are "still hungry" for reboots, and it shows in box office figures, even if American audiences get weary of ceaseless Transformers films.

There's also an issue of licensing. Reboots of super-recent films usually come around for blockbusters (particularly superhero flicks) for a slightly panicked reason.

"In the case of Spider-Man and other Marvel characters, the licenses are with other studios who will lose them if they do not actively make movies," Pandya explains. "So Sony needs to keep making Spider-Man films or else the rights go back to Marvel, who can take the character and make films with its parent studio Disney."

Whether you like it or not, remakes are an ingrained part of Hollywood culture. Here are five recently released movies that are being subjected to the remake treatment.