‘Remake’ and ‘reboot’ should be considered swear words. They certainly bring pain and distress when used.
Unfortunately there’s a reason for remakes and reboots and that is they make money. They are safe bets that work on nostalgia. You can spend X amount of dollars and expect to make your costs back if not turn an adequate profit. Audiences gravitate towards the familiar rather than the new.
Viewers have trouble watching whatever is original. They have had so much safe and familiar that new is too risky of a proposition for them. There is also the issue of studio executives afraid of letting creators be creative. Odd since that is what they get paid to do.
A regular feature of entertainment news seems to be the story about a director getting fired over creative differences. Prime examples are Solo: A Star Wars Story or even Ant-Man. Sometimes when you read about what they wanted to do, you kind of side with the studio. But there is just as often when you hear about what they wanted to do, you can’t understand what the problem was. The creator seems to understand the source material better than the suits do. At the minimum they have better ideas than the suits do.
Then there is the rare occasion when you get to see what should have been released as compared to what was released. That’s usually in the form of a director’s cut or the extremely rare case you get something like Zack Snyder’s Justice League which was head and shoulders above Josh Whedon’s Justice League.
The reboot is usually a project that fails to understand what made the property popular or enduring. Often reboots are done to reflect the worldview of whoever is doing the reboot and not the world which was originally created. Characters are changed to reflect modern sensibilities.
There are things in legacy properties that have connected with audiences. Something has kept that property around for however many decades. It’s the presentation of the character and the world in which they live. Be it a horror or an action or a science-fiction universe, there are things about those worlds that made them unique and stand out. And whatever it is it is most definitely not those large changes the new person wishes to make.
There are things in them that made people come back again and again and again. If you want to do something different or fresh you need to keep those things in mind. That doesn’t mean you’re locked into a particular structure or formula. Rather it means you need to remember the foundational mythology. You can have your own mythology, but it should look as if it was an outgrowth of what came before. You must see the path from A to B to C and so on.
Freddy should be in child killer with a seemingly random pattern. Michael Myers is an unstoppable killing machine. The characters of Star Trek are good people doing great things. Star Wars is operatic science-fiction where the good guys all get along and the main character goes through a hero’s journey. Forget these things or try to subvert expectations and you wind up with an inferior project that is connected to the legacy property in name only.
It’s a little more than that though. There is a look and feel to everything. There is an appearance that you got from A Nightmare on Elm Street films. I’m not talking about Freddy’s make up but rather the way the story was presented. The same thing with Halloween and Star Wars and James Bond. You can do a twist with all that, but you can’t completely up end things.
Star Wars tried to do this in The Last Jedi. James Bond dumped the whole formula in Casino Royale and completely upended things in No Time to Die. A Nightmare on Elm Street turned Freddy into a child molester who killed his victims to keep them quiet. That one I found a little more egregious. A child predator is certainly horrifying but what made Freddy originally creepy and disturbing was that his killings were completely random. He took pleasure in the death of a child but there was no real pattern as to who would die. Thinking about how he was before he became something supernatural not only made him something more frightening as a mere mortal but also reflected his behavior as the supernatural monster that he became.
I would love to regularly praise a reboot that’s as good or superior as the original but that hasn’t happened since I would say 1982 with John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. The original is a 50s classic. And if you can see it in that mindset for 90 minutes you can certainly understand how it was so good back then. The Thing 1982 took elements from the 50s version as well as the source material and made something that could be seen as connected to the original but stood firmly on its own. It was its own thing.
Taking a fictional universe and making it what you wish it was rather than what the creator of it intended is not only disrespectful to fans but to that very creator. What can be done within the stated mythology? Plenty in most cases if you take the time to build upon the existing world rather than change it.
In the end creators miss by a mile more often than not what worked and only seek to take a known property and portray it in their own image rather than the foundational image that made it so popular and enduring and that is why I don’t like reboots.
Warren Watched A Movie 