Let me just say, I’m all in on reboots. Same goes for sequels, live action remakes, crossovers, even digitally remastered versions of things. If it was awesome once, it can be awesome again. At the very least we can recast it with hotter actors, blow a bigger budget, and feature more explosions than the original. Studios know this and have been cashing in on it shamelessly for over a decade without any signs of slowing down.
Think of a movie that you loved as a kid, an iconic story that played a pivotal and cherished role in your upbringing. Now picture it with Kevin Hart and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson starring as the leads. Gal Gadot is in it too. That’s exciting right? What if they added a car chase now and a lot of racial but not racist jokes between Kevin and Dwayne. Would it still be your favorite movie or is your childhood ruined forever? Doesn’t matter because it just made 100 million at the box office opening weekend.
What’s so especially American dreamy about all this rebooting is that, by America’s capitalist standards, it works. The seven movies recently tacked onto the Star Wars Trilogy (let that sink in) were all huge box office hits. Toy Story gets funnier and sadder with every release even though it’s been decades since I’ve played with a toy that didn’t come from sex shop. Meanwhile The Fast and The Furious series is only getting faster…and more furious. From their humble beginnings of using cars to steal DVD players, they’re now using faster cars to save the world from cyber terrorists. One has to wonder where they’ll be in another nine movies. Well, one won’t have to wonder for long.
Even some of Hollywood’s most absurd creative risks are paying off handsomely. When tasked with making a sequel of the lovely Paddington, the studios decided the best course of action was sending Paddington to prison. They sent a stuffed bear, wrongly accused of theft, to a maximum-security prison. What focus group could they possibly have surveyed for that insight. It sounds like an idea my friends and I would have pitched drunk at 2am. “Let’s send that bear to the gulag for war crimes.” But they did it and it worked. Paddington 2 currently has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
At this point I know what you’re thinking, and to be fair, you’re right. Not all reboots are great, or good, or even watchable. Some might even be considered national tragedies. But we can’t let an all-female Ghostbusters stop us from pursuing, say, an all-female Fight Club, an all-male Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, or a Titanic where every character is played by Timothée Chalamet, a la Norbit. A few forever-ruined classics shall not stand in the way of progress. And by progress, I again mean the mass casting of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Kevin Hart.
Onwards and upwards! Today, even video games are fodder enough to replace original ideas. Standing on the shoulders of Tron and Sonic… The Last of Us is a video game plot turned TV masterpiece. And why stop at video games when there’s an entire world of real-life events to steal from. What will be the sequel to Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards? Who will star in The Slap 2? Whose wife’s name will the protagonist (antagonist?) need beaten out of his mouth?
Or how about Mayor Eric Adams, who created a job posting for a ‘Rat Zzar’ to help eliminate the city’s rat problem. Could he have created a more cinematic role if he tried? Picture it: a new rat-killing superhero for the Marvel Universe. A deliciously depraved Ratatouille crossover. A Stuart Little redemption film for the ages.
I could go on and on, but I’m getting away from the point. The point is that we need to forgive the sequels their trespasses and embrace the reboot attitude. Where would we be if A Star Is Born was just a Barbra Streisand film, or just a Judy Garland film, or just a Janet Gaynor film instead of a Lady Gaga masterpiece? We reboot until we get it right, and then reboot some more.
We love it because we have to, because in America reboots are ubiquitous. They’re reflected in our portion sizes, our love of plastic surgery, our politics. It is our nature to want the same things we’ve always wanted, just bigger, or hotter, and louder. And since we will never be content with what we have, we need to be OK letting what we have be rereleased in IMAX 4D. Who cares if ‘America 2’ ends up being a flop of a country? We’ve got America 3, 4, & 5 right there in the pipeline, featuring more guns, funnier outtakes, and hopefully Hart & Rock Johnson earning us 100 Rotten Tomatoes.