Way back in March I read the middling reviews for the new Ghostbusters movie and finally watched Men in Black International and thought, "You know, not everything needs to be a franchise." Both of those "franchises" started with one good movie and then a crappy sequel. In MIB's case there was an OK second sequel while Ghostbusters had a reboot people didn't care for and I never watched. Then they did revival movies that were...meh. Only Ghostbusters got a sequel to its revival that from the reviews is also meh.
Other revivals like Scream 4-6, Halloween-Halloween Ends, Terminator Dark Fate, Indiana Jones 4-5, Blade Runner 2049, and the ones mentioned above didn't do much for me either. I'm not sure there really has been a big franchise revival I actually liked. Maybe I'll think of one before this posts.
Meanwhile, prequels also don't have a great track record to me. Star Wars Episodes I-III really got the prequel train running--and it almost instantly derailed. Yet studios haven't stopped trying with crap like X-Men Origins Wolverine, GI Joe Origins Snake-Eyes, Terminator Salvation, Prometheus, and a slew of horror ones like the recent First Omen. About the only "prequels" that weren't terrible were X-Men First Class-Dark Phoenix, though by the end it was hard to even call those prequels since there was no way in hell they could actually connect to the original 2000 movie. Fox's Planet of the Apes movies from Rise to the current Kingdom are also good prequels though similarly I'm not sure at this point how much they really line up to the original movies. Besides Episodes I-III, Solo was meh but Rogue One was OK--especially the end when Vader brings the pain.
To my surprise, it turns out reboots actually have a better track record. The Nolan Batman movies were great and I liked The Batman too. The Spider-Man reboots were OK, though the second Garfield one got sidetracked by the studio wanting to jam too much in. Similarly, Man of Steel was an OK reboot but the studio got greedy and the franchise lost its way. I'm not a fan of the Roger Moore James Bond but On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Living Daylights, and Goldeneye were good reboots and the Daniel Craig ones weren't awful, especially Skyfall and No Time to Die. The 2014 Ninja Turtles movie surprised me by not being utterly terrible and the recent Mutant Mayhem wasn't bad. There have been less good reboots like Terminator Genisys, Nightmare on Elm Street, or the recent Road House. Some like the 2019 Hellboy or Rob Zombie's Halloween are basically a push. I didn't like the first two Star Trek reboot movies but other people did. Beyond was decent though not as many people watched it.
Anyway, I think if you look at the averages, reboots have a better track record than prequels and revivals. So why do studios keep doing prequels and revivals? Prequels I suppose it's when they've run out of ideas for sequels and in the case of The First Omen it'd be really hard to do a revival since it was so long ago. Or like with the Star Wars ones I doubt Lucas could have gotten all the original actors to do a sequel even if he'd wanted to in 1997.
Revivals I think there's this idea that having familiar names involved will be comforting to people and get them to watch the movie. The problem though is if you say Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher are in a Star Wars movie, I really don't want these geriatric versions who can hardly do anything. Same for Ghostbusters: I don't want old Bill Murray who's obviously just cashing a paycheck; I want the original, good version. The problem is until deepfake gets better or someone invents a time machine where you could scoop those actors out of the 80s to make a new movie, it ends up not being very satisfying. The "legacy" stars are too old to do much most of the time and the new characters wind up being underdeveloped so they end up not being memorable.
I guess the good thing with reboots is the directors/writers have more of a blank canvas. That gives them more freedom to create characters. They don't have to shove a bunch of old-timers in while making sure they don't tax the geezers too much. They also don't have to line up to events that have already happened or have that weird thing where stuff looks better in the past than in the original movies. If you're doing a Batman, Spider-Man, or Bond reboot there are of course certain things you have to do, but still as we've seen there are different ways to do it.
So really, while making actual new stuff would be best, of the three alternatives, reboots are the best. And I don't think it's even that close, but maybe you disagree. What are your favorite prequels, revivals, and reboots?
No comments:
Post a Comment