Left Behind was already made once (and sequel about life with all the Christians gonw). Why on earth make LB a second time? Totally not needed. They should have continued the previous series rather than reboot back to the beginning.
Because the creator and co-author of the Left Behind book series Tim LaHaye hated the previous direct-to-video trilogy of movies and refused to let Cloud Ten Pictures buy any more film rights for more installments. This left them stuck with only two books out of sixteen they could work with.
Eventually after many years of failed attempts to make a Left Behind TV series and a Left Behind 4 movie featuring original story material not found in the books ( which they were legally allowed to do ), producer Paul Lalonde decided the best bet was to reboot with a bigger budget and get more name stars to get both a world-wide theatrical release as well as a second chance to make LaHaye happy so he would let them make more movies directly based on the books. It worked and Left Behind 2014 got shown in many countries and Tim LaHaye gave his approval on it.
Too bad they made the movie a lackluster disaster film with some religious ideas, as opposed to a flat out God versus Satan action movie that would have been a lot more exciting.
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That's a generic question for all remakes: why?
Once in a while, it works: Of Mice and Men, True Grit, Maltese Falcon (yes, believe it or not, the famous Bogart version was a remake). Not too many more come to mind.
Most of the time, it's terrible. I just watched the Poltergeist remake and wondered who on Earth could possibly have thought that was a good idea.
That said, I'm still confused about what they were trying to do with this movie.
The books and the original series were clearly mostly aimed at people who already believed all that nonsense, but they had a lot of overt evangelizing, too, so *maybe* they hoped it would make some converts.
This movie, on the other hand, really soft peddled the religious part to turn it into a lame action movie. The cynical explanation is that they simply wanted to draw in a larger audience in a (failed) attempt to make money.
There's also the possibility that they hoped to "trick" some people into coming in the hopes of "spreading the word", but seriously, can you imagine anyone who wasn't already a true believer seeing this movie and saying "I should really give that Christianity stuff a try"?
Whenever a question begins with "But why do they..." the answer is almost invariably "Money."
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Christianity : A god who loves you so much that he'll set fire to you if you don't love him back