Why Does Hollywood Keep Making Remakes, Reboots, and Sequels?

How many old movies does Hollywood need to dig up before somebody finally tells them to knock it the fuck off?

Every time another remake, reboot, or sequel to some movie from the 80s gets announced, people immediately start complaining that Hollywood has run out of ideas. I don’t think that’s the problem at all. There are plenty of original scripts and concepts floating around out there, and probably plenty of talented writers trying to get somebody to take a chance on them. The problem is that the pencil-pushing executives greenlighting movies are too chickenshit to gamble millions of dollars on something that doesn’t already come with an established audience.

It’s much safer to drag out some franchise that people already recognize.

Studios know that even if the movie sucks, there are enough people who remember the original that they’ll probably show up anyway. Maybe they loved it as a kid, maybe they want to see what the characters look like 30 years later, or maybe they’re just curious to see whether the new movie is any good. You don’t have to convince these people to care about a new story because they already recognize the name on the poster. Nostalgia does half of the marketing for you.

This is how we end up with sequels to movies that came out decades ago and never needed sequels in the first place.

Dumb and Dumber To is one of the better examples of this. I love the original Dumb and Dumber, I’ve probably seen it a hundred times over the years and I’ll still watch it whenever I come across it. The sequel came out 20 years later and basically just repeated the first movie. Harry and Lloyd go on another road trip, get themselves into similar situations, and spend most of the movie recycling the same style of jokes that worked much better when the characters were younger and the concept was still fresh.

It added absolutely nothing.

I know comedy sequels aren’t exactly expected to revolutionize cinema, but if you’re bringing a movie back after two decades I’d like there to at least be some reason for doing it besides “People remember this.” Dumb and Dumber To felt less like somebody had a good idea for another Harry and Lloyd story and more like somebody realized Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were both still alive and available. The entire movie existed because the first one was popular.

Top Gun: Maverick did the same thing much better.

I’ll give that movie credit where it’s due. The aerial scenes looked fucking amazing, the cinematography was excellent, and it was probably about as good as a sequel to Top Gun made more than 30 years later could reasonably be. But the basic story is still very similar to the original movie. Maverick is still Maverick, there’s another group of hotshot pilots, more interpersonal drama, another dangerous mission, and plenty of familiar music and imagery to make sure everyone remembers the movie they watched in 1986.

I enjoyed it, but I still don’t think we desperately needed it.

That’s how I feel about a lot of these older franchises getting dragged back out. They’re not always terrible, and occasionally somebody does manage to make a pretty good movie out of one. The problem is that very few of them seem to exist because somebody actually had a story they desperately wanted to tell. Most feel like the studio started with the franchise name first, then figured out what the movie would be afterward.

Remakes are even worse.

Why remake something that was already good?

If the original movie sucked but had an interesting premise, then I can see the argument. Take a good idea that was poorly executed and give somebody else a chance to do it better. Instead, Hollywood usually wants to remake movies that were successful specifically because they were already good. Then everybody acts surprised when the remake gets compared unfavorably to the movie it copied.

If I want to watch an old movie, I can still watch the old movie. What I’d rather see is something new.

We’ve already seen that original movies can still attract attention if somebody is willing to make them. Obsession is a good example. It wasn’t based on some 40-year-old franchise, it wasn’t a reboot, and it didn’t need a giant celebrity cast to convince people to watch it. The biggest recognizable name in the movie was Andy Richter. Somebody simply came up with an idea and made a movie out of it.

Remember when that was normal?

A lot of the movies Hollywood keeps exploiting for nostalgia started exactly that way. At one point nobody knew what Ghostbusters was. Predator wasn’t a beloved franchise until somebody took a chance and made the first one. Terminator, Die Hard, Alien, and countless other movies weren’t guaranteed money because audiences already knew the characters.

They had to become popular first.

If the executives running Hollywood back then were as terrified of original ideas as the executives seem to be now, half of the franchises being rebooted today probably wouldn’t exist.

I understand why studios are doing this. Movies are expensive, and if you’re going to dump $100 million into something, a recognizable property probably looks like a safer investment than some weird original script nobody has ever heard of. Nobody wants to be the executive who signs off on a massive flop and gets blamed for losing the studio a pile of money.

But making movies entirely around minimizing risk eventually gives you a bunch of boring shit.

At some point, Hollywood has to take chances again. Otherwise, what exactly are people going to be nostalgic for 30 years from now? Are we going to start making remakes of the remakes? Maybe we’ll get another Top Gun sequel where an 80-year-old Maverick trains yet another class of pilots while everyone talks about how great the previous sequel was.

I don’t need another movie reminding me about something I already liked. I want another movie worth remembering.

Hollywood hasn’t run out of ideas. The people controlling the money have just become too afraid to bet on any of them.

All this nostalgia bait is starting to make me nostalgic for a time when movies weren’t constantly trying to make me nostalgic.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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