Hollywood Reboots & Remakes: Why Now?
On Monday, the director of the new Jurassic Park movie explained his aim for the seventh film in the series. it was karaoke. To prepare, he binged Steven Spielberg clips on repeat, hoping to accomplish genre cloning.
He was trying to make it feel nostalgic. The goal was that it should feel like Worldwide Studios went into their vaults and found a reel of film,brushed the dust off and it said: Jurassic World: Rebirth.
“And they’re like: ‘What’s this? We don’t remember doing this!’ I wanted it to feel like a film they’d discovered from the early 90s.”
Time travellers from that period to the present day would be forgiven for wondering whether their delorean was on the blink. Not only are Oasis and Pulp soundtracking the summer with hits from Britpop’s golden years, but film-makers, too, are really spoiling us.
in a fortnight,we return to the scene of the crime of 1997’s ripe slasher sensation I Know What You Did Last Summer for a new movie boasting exactly the same title,as well as key cast Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. The 2025 film continues the events of 1998’s I Still Know what You Did Last Summer but ignores 2006’s now non-canonical I’ll Always Know what You Did Last Summer.
August brings The Naked Gun, with Liam Neeson slipping into the Swiss army shoes vacated by Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling police lieutenant in 1994, as well as a remake of 1989’s The War of the Roses, this time called The Roses, with Olivia colman locked in marital battle with Benedict Cumberbatch.
Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return for a very belated sequel to their 2003 bodyswap comedy Freakier Friday, while currently marauding through cinemas is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s reanimation of the zombie horror series he started in 2002.
Still hanging on strong across multiplexes, meanwhile, is Final Destination: bloodlines, the first new instalment for 14 years of the franchise that’s been confirming people’s worst fears about tanning beds, log trucks and acupuncture since the turn of the century.
Also on offer during the holidays are a rebooted Superman, a new Fantastic Four movie and assorted anniversary reissues including The Goonies (which turns 40), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (20), Human Traffic (26), Sense and Sensibility (30) and Spinal Tap (41).
Hollywood is stuck on repeat, sucked with an ever-more deafening gurgle into a death cycle of creative bankruptcy desperately presented as comfort food. That this packaging strategy works is thanks in part to the dire state of the world beyond the cinema; audiences are eager for escape.
They seem to be spending a lot of time in 1994 is because those people making decisions in Hollywood,and commissioning others to execute them,came of age around this time (Edwards turns 50 next weekend). They are therefore especially keen to relive a more innocent pre-smartphone era – as well as introduce it to their offspring.
cinemas actively encouraging this sort of indulgence is not new. George Lucas’s breakthrough, American Graffiti (1973), harked fruitfully back to his own youth, just as Back to the Future (1985) – which Spielberg executive produced - lucratively teleported parents to their mid-50s heyday.the difference is that those movies were developed in an entertainment ecosystem with sufficient ambition and capacity to support them. Both films advanced cinema accordingly.
There is no way back to the Future would be made today, said its writer Bob Gale, on Thursday.Not just as of the colossal cost and reams of theoretical physics. “We’d go into the studio and they’d say, what’s the deal with this relationship between marty and Doc? They’d start interpreting paedophilia or something. there would be a lot of things they have problems with.”
Small wonder studios today are so risk-adverse. This is an industry in freefall, clutching at the surest things in sight as it scrabbles to regain footing after Covid - which closed about 8,000 screens worldwide, half of them in the US – and the nearly six-month strikes of 2023 and subsequent dearth of content.Both these moments proved huge opportunities for streamers to stake a yet greater claim on the marketplace.
Playing safe is simply good business sense: “Look at this year’s biggest hits to date. [Chinese animation] Ne Zha 2, Lilo