diff --git a/django/template/defaultfilters.py b/django/template/defaultfilters.py
index d8b0c3439a..1bfb627023 100644
--- a/django/template/defaultfilters.py
+++ b/django/template/defaultfilters.py
@@ -468,13 +468,8 @@ def safeseq(value):
 @stringfilter
 def removetags(value, tags):
     """Removes a space separated list of [X]HTML tags from the output."""
-    tags = [re.escape(tag) for tag in tags.split()]
-    tags_re = '(%s)' % '|'.join(tags)
-    starttag_re = re.compile(r'<%s(/?>|(\s+[^>]*>))' % tags_re, re.U)
-    endtag_re = re.compile('</%s>' % tags_re)
-    value = starttag_re.sub('', value)
-    value = endtag_re.sub('', value)
-    return value
+    from django.utils.html import remove_tags
+    return remove_tags(value, tags)
 
 @register.filter(is_safe=True)
 @stringfilter