Even the most casual pop culture enthusiasts could tell you that remakes and reboots are everywhere. (What’s the difference between the two terms? Is it the glimmer of hope provided by the latter? I’m not sure.) How popular are these things? After months of wrangling over the plot and casting for “Spider-Man 4,” Sony Pictures decided to scrap franchise star Tobey Maguire and director Sam Raimi in favor of a new director, a younger, hotter star who has yet to be named — oh, and a completely rebooted plot featuring Peter Parker in high school. If that wasn’t enough, casting is underway for the new “Conan the Barbarian” series, and the reboot of the “Karate Kid” franchise comes out this June.

Now that every studio on the planet is trying to get into the reboot biz, so-called Americanizations have lost a bit of their luster.  Primarily reserved for horror movies (“The Ring” “Quarantine,” “The Grudge”) and TV adaptations (“The Office,” “All in the Family”), these American remakes of foreign works have garnered vats of money for the studios, but little in the way of real prestige.  Until now. Maybe.

Amidst all the reboots, 2010 will also usher in two of the more highly anticipated American remakes in recent years: April’s “Death at a Funeral” and October’s “Let Me In.” For the most part, these remakes have been based on works that were little-known at best outside the United States (“Infernal Affairs” is a recent exception), but “Let Me In” has the added burden of cribbing from one of the best foreign films of the last five years, Sweden’s “Let the Right One In.” To make matters worse, “Let Me In” also has the bad luck of being a haunting and genuinely scary vampire film about two platonically passionate friends — in an era of emo bloodsuckers that sparkle in sunlight.

Frankly, what scares me is director Matt Reeves’ insistence on calling the remake an Americanization in the first place. The film and the book it’s based on traffic in pretty universal themes: There are bullied and lonely kids everywhere. Children come of age every day, all over the world. Teenagers are falling in love for the first time at this very moment. I’m not sure what we’ll get out of Reeves’ Americanization of the story. Will the climactic pool scene — one of the coolest things I’ve seen on film in years — look more like a Michael Bay fever dream? What works best about “Let the Right One In” is what you don’t see and what isn’t said, and that terrible sense of foreboding could be lost in translation in favor of CGI fangs and squirting squibs.  (For the record, Reeves promises that the new film will be “a darker, scarier journey than ‘Twilight.’”)

“Death at a Funeral” is an even more unusual cinematic specimen: an American remake of a successful three-year-old British English-language film. My initial reaction to this film could only be described as a long string of question marks, but my feelings changed after I saw the trailer. For one thing, the movie looks pretty funny — a bit more over-the-top ridiculous than the original British farce, but that’s to be expected. The movie also features a multiracial cast (a major change from the original) that includes Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan and Danny Glover, directed by cinematic misanthrope extraordinaire Neil LaBute. The remake looks awfully faithful to its source, but LaBute’s presence gives me hope that this will be a darker take on the traditional family comedy. If I must quibble at all, I’m not crazy about the major plot point revealed in the trailer, but I’m really curious to see what this cast does with the material.

They’ve been around for a long time, and these Americanizations of foreign films aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the reboots or the remakes, for that matter. Are they evidence that Hollywood’s running out of ideas? Almost certainly. But when you’re adapting material like this, does it even matter?