Reboots - Time to Stop the Madness
*Thanks to my friends Danver and Fenwick whose discussions with me inspired this piece
We are living in the age of reboots. Everything from Jumanji to the 1980s soap opera Dynasty have been rebooted over the last several years. Den of Geek did a comprehensive list of movie remakes and as of November 2018, there were 121 remakes/reboots on that list. And that doesn’t even touch all the remakes that have been made in the past several years. We have reached the point of reboot madness. Complete and utter madness.
The desire to make reboots rather than original works is understandable. Economically, why pour money into something new and different when you can milk it from something known and familiar? It’s the same economic incentives as franchises. You also have a built-in audience of people who are at least curious to try the new version of something they either liked or loved. Aside from that, nostalgia plays a huge roll. People who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s now are old and established enough to play with something they loved. In that sense, reboots are often borderline, if not outright, fanfiction.
Of course, not all reboots are bad. I am a big fan of Voltron, for example, and from what I’ve read about the 1980s version, the reboot is far superior in term of plot, diversity, and treatment of women. It’s a reboot done right - nods to original to please the old fans while still bringing in new ones, and updating the entire thing for the 21st century.
It’s fantastic that many of the reboots have drastically increased the number of women, people of color, and LGBT characters in a given story. But there is a specificity to stories that are written for and by less-represented group that reboots of past, often significantly less diverse, works generally don’t have. Crazy Rich Asians, which I love has a pivotal scene that revolves around two women playing mahjong. I don’t understand mahjong in the slightest and had to read an article explaining it all to me, but that scene would have been less powerful, even for someone like me, if it hadn’t been done this way. That kind of specificity is lost when you just stick someone else in a role initially written for a white man. It’s not impossible to add in that specificity, but it is less likely to exist in reboots.
In a similar vein, a reliance of reboots stifles creativity in the area of entertainment. If studios focus on the “safe bets” of reboots, that is money they could otherwise be spending on making and marketing original films. Why bother investing in something new, different, and potentially unprofitable when you know you can make money doing an updated version of a beloved Disney movie? Just as importantly, why would aspiring screenwriters spend their time developing and nurturing new idea and stories, when they are less likely to get made? It would be both disheartening and less economically viable for writers. This leaves a great deal of creative energy and talent untapped and underused. Both cultural and individual creativity are stifled by our cultural obsession with reboots.
Original, new content can be a crapshoot for the studios/producers etc, but the hits can arguably outweigh the risks both for the creators and for pop culture as a whole. Get Out was nominated at the Oscars for Best Picture, won for Best Original Screenplay, and was an extremely profitable film to boot. And that’s not even touching the cultural impact of the movie. I’m not a fan of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but I’m really glad the show exists and what it does for depictions of mental health issues. These shows and movies likely will have a lasting positive cultural impact. Far more so than a reboot of Flash Gordon would.
Finally, the oversaturation of reboots engenders anger from the population who are expected to buy into them, both figuratively and literally. Nostalgia is a two-edged sword. While people want to wallow in it and have it be an active part of their lives, they also want to leave it as a pristine, perfect thing behind glass. For every person who was excited about the Beauty and the Beast live remake, there was someone who was not pleased by it - see Lindsey Ellis’ beautiful takedown of the film for an example. My knee-jerk reaction of anger at a good chunk of remakes is because of my deep love of the version from my childhood. Mulan is sacrosanct and perfect as is thank you very much. Honestly, the people who cracked the nostalgia code the best were the Duffer Brothers who created Stranger Things. The show provides all the ‘80s nostalgia anyone could desire but in the context of an original show. The best of both worlds.
Of course, some stories, like Robin Hood and King Arthur, are always going to be told and retold. There is a distinction to be made though, between retelling an old story and rebooting something. Clueless was a retelling of the Jane Austen novel Emma, for example. A reboot of Clueless, something on Den of Geek’s list, would hit the same notes of the ‘90s movie, not the source material itself. The live action Beauty and the Beast wasn’t a new version of the French folktale (of which there are many) but a redo of the ‘90s Disney movie version of said folktale. It’s the difference between going back to the source material to reinterpret a story and making a copy of a copy.
All in all, this is not to say I’m anti-reboot. I’m a big fan of the Voltron reboot, as I mentioned earlier, and love both Riverdale – the gritty dark TV Archie reboot – and The Lego Batman Movie. What I object to, besides the crass mining of my childhood favorites for a quick profit by studios, is the overwhelming glut of reboots. Just as I love me some Avengers and still think we have way too many superhero films overall, reboots would probably be fine in moderation. Reboots can be done well, can bring something cool to a new generation, or take something and update it for the modern era. But the sheer glut and reliance on reboots have an overall negative impact on pop culture, even if some of them are good in isolation. And it’s that glut that needs to stop, for the sake of culture and our collective sanity.
