What Can You Reboot?
A Hollywood reboot of movies and TV series seem to be the latest go-to trend for producing content. How many different Batman movies have there been? Seems like they just finish rebooting it with one actor and they immediately introduce the next. I was just getting used to Ben Affleck in the cape and cowl and now I gotta psyche myself up for glittery vampire Batman.
And just how many Spider-Mans (Spiders-Man? Spider-Mens?) have there been?
They had to create a Spider-Man Multi-verse movie just to account for all the reboots of that character.
Like all things, not every reboot is bad — the reboot of One Day At A Time was actually pretty good. The reboot of Hawaii 5-0 paid decent homage to the original.
But did we really need a reboot of Willy Wonka?
Gene Wilder was the perfect Willy Wonka. Johnny Depp was a bad choice for a replacement, especially when you’re telling what was basically the original story.
The recasting of Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins didn’t smack of being a reboot because it wasn’t an attempt to retell the story from the Julie Andrews version — it was a sequel. If they’d treated the Wonka film as a sweet new adventure with Depp in the leading role, it would’ve been easier to swallow (candy-eating pun intended).
Charlies Angels had a movie reboot with Drew Barrymore that was “meh”, and then a TV series rebot which was terrible, and then another movie reboot which actually wasn’t too bad (or at least not as bad as the previous ones.
A Reboot can be a gamble if you’re trying to recapture the original magic — but they can be an opportunity to continue telling a story and telling a new story about the original content.
You probably have an amazing collection of success stories in your portfolio. Why not pick one of your major achievements and find a way to reboot the concept?
- What was left unsaid the first time around?
- What would the next step had been if the project had continued?
- Who should star in a sequel to the original project?
Think about a project from the past that you feel still has a lot of life and character in it. Think about how you might improve it if you were to launch it today.
Make your reboot so original that it can stand on his own two feet, rather than having to ride the coattails of its earlier incarnation.
