1 The Reboot

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Construction workers know that there's only so much damage a structure can take before you have to knock the building down and put up a new one. This same logic applies to movie franchises. After the sequels go into the double digits and run the gamut of aforementioned tropes, the time has ultimately come for a reboot, otherwise known as the "Ol' Fuck It, Let's Start Again."

Reboots and remakes are different. A remake often works as a loving homage to the original film, whereas a reboot tends to aggressively disown its source material, instantly establishing itself as the new canonical version and asking you to please forget all the prior, shittier films that preceded it.



"Ice to see you!"

There two reasons this is becoming maybe the worst of all of these gimmicks:

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One, because it overwhelmingly is the one we're most likely to fall for. Installing a new director, cast and rewinding the timeline to the origin story is somehow supposed to make us forget that all of the creative juice has been squeezed out of the character a decade ago. And we will. The good feelings earned by Batman and Bond reboots have convinced us that somehow you can make Freddy fresh again.

And this leads to the second problem, which is that this will ultimately be more overused than any of the gimmicks mentioned above. In 2003, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot opened the floodgates. Since then, Halloween, Friday the 13th and Children of the Corn have seen reboots, and Hellraiser, Child's Play and the aforementioned A Nightmare on Elm Street have reboots in production. In fact, of all the franchises mentioned in this article, the only one no one will touch is Leprechaun.

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Seriously, we'll get word on a Troll reboot any minute now.

The Worst Offender:

Halloween because it's the only franchise that they tried to reboot twice.

1998's Halloween H20 accepted only John Carpenter's first two films as canon and brought back Jamie Lee Curtis for the lead role. Although, the film was actually praised by critics as a return to form, the franchise immediately fucked up again with Halloween Resurrection, which performed abysmally at the box office and killed the franchise a second time.

Almost a decade later, Rob Zombie took another bite of the reboot pie with 2007's hugely successful Halloween. And again, Zombie's 2009 sequel utterly failed to deliver. Yes, even a man whose driver's license reads "Mr. Zombie" could not bring Halloween back from the dead.



Maybe he should call himself Rob Necromancer.

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And check out some other things you had no idea Hollywood was driving into the ground, in 5 Things Hollywood Reuses More Than Plots and 5 Things Movie Trailers Need to Stop Doing.

And stop by our Top Picks (Updated 2.10.2010) to see the new trailer for RoboCop versus the Terminator.

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