There have always been movie remakes, as long before the words “intellectual property” became common currency, studios were remaking scripts or books they had the rights to.

Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” was not just a 1944 classic with Bogie and “introducing” Lauren Bacall. As long as the rights were active, other versions turned up.

But “Hello Ghost” has to be a peak intellectual property moment. It was a 2010 Korean film about a suicidal man haunted by four ghosts he can see but no one else does, thanks to his “final” attempt at taking his life.

It’s similar enough to the sentimental Ricky Gervais romp “Ghost Town” as to have been inspired by it, but different enough to pack a bigger punch with a “twist” at the end.

Not content to have the rights to the original film, Netflix is behind not one but TWO fresh remakes of it — an Indonesian version, and a Taiwanese one, which I’m reviewing here.

Netflix is reaching back to a practice common during the early days of the “talkies.” MGM and other studios would make a domestic market version of a movie, and one for the Latin market, or Germany or wherever. Sometimes the star, the story and the title would be the only thing common to all the different versions. That was what you did if you wanted your property to make lots of dollars, pesos, francs and rubles in the days before dubbing or “closed captioning.”

Here Tseng Jing-hua plays a suicidal Taiwanese 20something whose 21st try at ending his miserable life comes close enough to succeeding that a paramedic (Shao Yo-wei) must bring him back to life on the way to the hospital. He hallucinates that she’s an angel come to save him.

But in the hospital, a traumatized plump and matronly woman (Tsai Jia-yin) and a fiesty older lady (Ching Lu-yi) who’d love to bitch out the nurses, if they could only see and hear her. A pranks-prone little boy (Hung Chun-hao) and an Elvis-haired chain-smoker (Chang Zhang-xing) also manifest themselves to our patient

Our lad is haunted by these folks, leading a doctor to think he’s crazy. And he will continue to be haunted by them, according to a psychic he visits, until their “wishes” come true, thanks to him.

Next thing our hapless but no longer suicidal young man knows, he’s hunting for an ancient taxi in the wrecking yard because somebody would love a last ride in his car, visiting an amusement park and rooting through a huge jar of dried radishes for an old lotto ticket.

At every step of the way, he stumbles into the paramedic, who is perplexed at these coincidences, and seriously bent out of shape at the money trouble her hustler-brother has stirred up with some gangsters.

Some story threads you can figure out, even without that banger saved for the finale.

The best sight gag in any of these adaptations has to be all the ghosts hanging off our hero’s body or crowded onto his motorbike with him — unseen, except by him. Aside from that, many of the “Ghost” pranks feeled pretty played by this point.

And in the Taiwanese version, director Hsieh Pei-ju and screenwriter Chou Ching-wen half-ruin their Big Finish by over-explaining and back-engineering the story of how that “twist” impacted everything that happened before.

“Hello Ghost” proves to be a durable comedy that more or less “travels” and works in a lot of languages. But whatever was special about the Korean version seems watered-down and pretty tired by now.

God forbid Netflix trot out Peruvian and Canadian versions.

Rating: TV-14, suicide attempts, lots of smoking

Cast: Tseng Jing-hua, Shao Yo-wei, Tsai Jia-yin, Ching Lu-yi, Hung Chun-hao and Chang Zhang-xing

Credits: Directed by Hsieh Pei-ju, scripted by Chou Ching-wen, based on the Korean film by Kim Young-tak. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41