In Desperate Hours a suburban family is taken hostage by an escaped convict and two accomplices. In the remake of Desperate Hours it is the teenage daughter who is defiant when her family is taken hostage, while her young brother is openly fearful of their captors. These roles are reversed from the original version of the film. The original and the remake of Desperate Hours each explore the theme of family, but in different ways. In both versions of Desperate Hours the victimized family is drawn together as the characters take strength from one another in the face of adversity. The family in the remake is strained, however, as the parents are in the process of divorcing. The wife must find the ability once again to trust the man she has rejected. In the original Desperate Hours the escaped convict, Glenn Griffin (Humphrey Bogart), understands the bonds of family. He reveals that the reason he chose the Hilliard's house was because he saw a bicycle on the lawn. Griffin knows that a family man is not likely to take any chances. Griffin is deeply troubled when he learns that his own brother has been killed. The escaped convict in the remake, Michael Bosworth (Mickey Rourke), is a genius, but he is thoroughly depraved. Bosworth chooses the Hilliard's house because of its affluent appearance. He simply wants to take the lifestyle that Tim Cornell (Anthony Hopkins) enjoys. At one point he puts on a tuxedo so that he would be properly dressed for dinner. In the original film, the escaped convict has contempt for his wealthy hostage (Frederic March) because he has faced judgment at the hands of such men, but in the remake, the same character is simply sadistic, enjoying the power that a captor has over hostages.

Father of the Bride reveals that intergenerational relations between family members have also changed. Where Stanley T. Banks (Spencer Tracy) had only a paternal relationship with his daughter, George Banks (Steve Martin) is also a friend to his daughter. In the remake father and daughter play one-on-one basketball and they are interested in the same kinds of entertainment (the Los Angeles Lakers and Paul Simon). The tone of Steve Martin's narration reveals that his view of the wedding is different from Spencer Tracy's. In the original film, the father of the bride carefully watched the bottom line because he feared that his wife and daughter did not understand the value of money. Steve Martin also frets over the money, but it is clear that he is more worried about losing his daughter than how much money he has to spend. His complaints about the cost of the wedding are merely to cover his feelings of emotional loss. This loss makes Steve Martin slow to accept his daughter's fiance. Spencer Tracy doesn't immediately accept his future son-in-law, either, but that's because he is worried that his future son-in-law will not be a good provider. Both of these films led to sequels in which the title character becomes a grandfather. The sequel to the Spencer Tracy original kept the economic theme in Father's Little Divident (1951), while the Steve Martin sequel opted for the unimaginative Father of the Bride 2 (1995).

Even more revealing than differences between the originals and their remakes are the similarities. Hollywood's image of suburbia has not changed much in the 40 years spanning the filming of the original films and their remakes. The physical surroundings in each of these movies has changed very little. Suburbia still represents a high degree of affluence and an environment for raising families. The main difference between the households in the original and remade films is the presence of servants. In the original films even households of moderate means had a servant, but that is not the case in the recent films, where only the very wealthy have live-in servants. The racial and ethnic composition of suburbs in the remakes has changed very little from that in the original films. The only African-Americans we see in the original films are servants and service workers. In the recent films blacks no longer play roles as servants (the only servant we see in any of the remakes is the Hispanic servant of the wealthy future in-laws in Father of the Bride. African-Americans still occupy menial service jobs in the remakes, but the most notable new role for African-Americans is that of police officers.