I don’t really care much about remakes, though, the originals are still around so just watch those instead. Regardless of what they do to the main characters I tend to just ignore Hollywood’s remakes these days.
A lot of people agree with you but for me it completely depends on the execution. The new Ghostbusters had different characters and jokes and it made me laugh. The Judge Dredd remake was an actual movie instead of a silly Stallone vehicle. I haven’t seen True Grit yet but it is supposedly really good.
I don’t avoid things just because they carry the same name as other things.
True Grit was great. Like I said, I tend to ignore them. If it interests me and it seems to be an honest attempt to reimagine an existing property, I’ll give it a shot. If it looks to me like purely an attempt to cash-in on an existing name because of it’s brand recognition, I avoid it. A good example of that would be CHIPS, or the Netflix Full House sequel. It’s usually pretty easy to tell.