It’s not just our presidential election that’s in reruns these days. The past decade or so has seen a plague of films that are remakes, or in the case of film series, reboots. Occasionally there are defensible reasons for this. But often, the very fact that these films exist when better judgment should have prevented them from being green-lit suggests not just the triumph of commerce over art or entertainment, but also the triumph of extremely short-term and short-sighted commercial interests over any sort of ambition or long-term vision for the industry.
Sequels, of course, have been with us forever, and the movie industry has also been retelling previously told stories as long as there have been movies, and since nearly the beginning, that’s included a fair number of retellings of things already done on film. The classic 1939 version of the Wizard of Oz, for example, was preceded by as many as ten Oz films, including a three-movie arc in 1914 produced by L. Frank Baum’s own film company and a full-length movie in 1925. But those were silent black-and-white films; the introduction of sound and color, combined with fantastic performances and memorable songs, allowed the 1939 version to retell the story in ways that buried the memory of every prior adaptation. What resulted remains the definitive film version, just as there is but one definitive film version of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind or Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather.
But here’s where we’ve gone wrong: Movie studios aren’t making things to be a definitive version of the story anymore. Nor are they resurrecting stories from the past that have been forgotten. They’re trying to lure back people who are nostalgic for the definitive version. The whole reason for many of today’s remakes and reboots is to tap into a built-in audience that thinks the story was done right before and hopefully will come back anyway for something that really doesn’t pretend to be an equivalent. Or, the studio needs to keep using the intellectual property to keep the rights to it (this is why Spider-Man keeps returning to kill poor Uncle Ben every couple of years). Or, worst of all, somebody thinks the classic original needs to be done with a demographically different cast (think of the female Ghostbusters). True, a lesser remake can be semi-justified if it follows the path of some recent films that took a comedy or drama, translated it into a successful and popular stage musical, and then filmed the musical. Even so, such projects tend to just trade on the goodwill of the original.
Insisting upon stories with a built-in audience is, perhaps, a rational way to limit the number of total flops (although some of these projects have lost quite a bit of money). But it also inherently limits the capacity of a film to be a hit — and big hits are what really pays the bills in the movies. Moreover, by just incessantly trading on the goodwill of prior hits, Hollywood is eating its own seed corn, chasing ever-diminishing returns on each property in the back catalog without replenishing the store of that catalog for the next generation to draw upon. This is, like so much in our culture today, a strategy born of despair about the future — as Ross Douthat likes to say, it is fundamentally decadent. At worst, it’s like the internet algorithms that decide to show me ads for things I just bought and therefore am least likely to buy again soon.
Even if genuinely outstanding new stories are in short supply, it doesn’t have to be this way. A better approach is to remake or reboot stories that fit one of two categories. The first is things that were done poorly before. That may sound counterintuitive to risk-averse studio bigwigs who think only in terms of “if it sold before it will sell again, and if it flopped before it will flop again.” But if a novel was badly adapted or a clever idea was spoiled by some poor creative decisions, that’s the raw material from which something better can be made that will become the new definitive version. The other source is things obscure or forgotten: very old movies now neglected, or foreign films that didn’t really penetrate the American market. Both of these have often been good source material for movies in the past. It’s a better way to make movies with optimism rather than despair.