War of the 'RE's: Remakes and Reboots Are Now Hollywood's Most Destructive Habit

Watch your step here in 2013. The franchise is king now. And the franchise doesn't like newcomers. In fact, the franchise is so adverse to virgin flesh that anything implying 'new' has become a hated thing; a darkling creature to be reviled, mistrusted and scorned like Judas, pure anathema.

Oh, surely you exaggerate, sir.

Do I? Did you ever think, even at our most charitable, that we would be holding up disastrous bombs like John Carter and Battleship as MARTYRS, casualties of an insidious depredation even worse than the short-sighted inanity that spawned them? Yet it is so. Those aforementioned shits-in-a-hat are the VICTIMS now, innocent bystanders in the campaign to rid the celluloid empire of anything remotely original. Make all the cracks you want about Rihanna trying to act, slapdash and spirit-robbing visuals or poor hapless Taylor Kitsch (whose name even sounds like a failed film, as in, 'Geez, that rookie director totally kitsched that movie'), but they were part of noble – yes, noble! – if ill-advised attempt to break ground on fresh Hollywood real estate and buoy up a box office weighed down with old news.

Utterly RIDICULOUS statement, right? You shan't reel me into your cantrip, sir, for I know those films were mere flummery. But bear with me. I know, it's amazing I can even get away with writing that last paragraph, considering neither Battleship nor John Carter were original works. But they are two recent parts of an otherwise unconnected triad of foolhardy attempts to make something (technically) old (sorta) new again. The third and latest (and, I suspect, last) holdout of the non-original originals, The Lone Ranger, just ate it at the ticket counter and is defying both math and physics by 'generating negative dollars', as one anonymous source put it.

'Nother words, the Delorean didn't hit 88, Doc. Consequently the suits in the studio Tower(s) of Mordor are more terrified than ever of anything that isn't compulsively clone-able; mere sequels are now reserved for dangerous progressives whose shades will not darken their ichor-splattered doors.

The film industry appears to have borrowed a page from its older, more long-winded brother in the Entertainment family, publishing. Publishing, particularly fiction publishing, has mutated – please note I pointedly avoided saying 'evolved' – into a long game, a ten-year-plus plan that eschews one-shots and stand-alones in favor of serial installments. Conservatively a 'series' might refer to a trilogy, but the surer bet now is even more – think five or six, maybe more, all spawned from the same source material. A Nebula-award winner told me not long ago that new writers especially need to think less about their debut novel and more about debut-plus-two, and to be prepared to tuck in for a long sit on one topic should a publisher express interest. Why? Because they want to find something that works and squeeze it for every red cent, that's why. That subject is another post for another time (because it's scary and sad and is worthy of discussion), but the general idea also applies to what is going on right now in the business of making pictures.

How did it come to this, as if we media-savvy journeyers didn't already know?

Movies are ludicrously expensive to make these days. As a kid I can remember Newsweek balking at the then unheard-of price tag of $92 million for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Today that's considered a quaint sum indeed; a down payment for a decent cast and a crew of sober drivers, perhaps, or enough for three or four rom-coms starring Jennifer Garner. But these days nothing under nine figures will suffice for a flagship summer blockbuster or an effects-driven event piece. The flipside, of course, is that the last decade or so has given us some of the biggest box office RETURNS – think 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, 'Avatar', 'The Avengers', and, a surprise for me, 'Iron Man 3', all now members of the coveted One Billion Worldwide Club. On the surface it appears the Universe is in balance, right? Pricer flicks, bigger returns.

But somewhere along the line it all got out of whack. Fewer and fewer films are turning any profit at all, or, even when profitable, STILL aren't making enough to keep the studio in the black when weighed against the year's failures. Because the movies that bomb often cost as much or more to make as the ones that triumph.

Blame the rising cost of advertising (including hip, high-tech enticements like viral web campaigns), skyrocketing labor demands, travel expenses, ever-widening online and cable competition, and the asking price of Hollywood A-listers, which for many have mushroomed disproportionately with their audience draw (looking at you, Johnny Depp). Cartoons? Long regarded as free money by studios who knew when and how to release them, animated features have become almost as risky, given the massive workload the all-CGI productions now require, and the added drain of studios INSISTING on using known stars with huge rates as voice talent. Plenty of blame to go around. Bottom line: in a world where everything from a glossy period piece to a gross-out comedy is a potential leech on a studio's pocketbook, the only way the guarantee a – wait for it – 'reasonable rate of return' is to have one or two MEGA blockbusters with their seven-figure margins in the tubes for inevitable deployment.

These super-flicks are like great white sharks: huge, ravenous, requiring constant forward movement. They must be pumped out with assembly line regularity or risk being sideswiped by another over-budgeted leviathan during prime seat-filling seasons. Missing a target weekend or crucial holiday window is akin to losing your spot in the Apple Store Genius queue: it dooms the hapless slowpoke to mediocrity and slow death. It also doesn't leave much room for innovation, invention, insight, or anything that might make the film feel somehow – God forbid – different from the multitude of look-alikes invading the screen every year.

So the franchise has become the Favored Son. Find a property with proven appeal and repackage it, with minor variations, again and again ad infinitum. THE REBOOT! And to do it frequently and fast we can't wait around for the next genius screenwriter with odd-colored socks and peanut shells in his hair to give us another 'Citizen Kane'. No, we have to mine the past for all it's worth and turn new scripts out of old material on a week's notice between the animatics and the table read. THE REMAKE! And all who heard it rejoiced.

You need only take a cursory glance at the recent offerings to get a sense of how off-the-deep-end studios have become in applying this philosophy. Stuff that wasn't very good to begin with is being reconstituted into hideous offspring like Ripley in Alien 4, stuff with limited appeal that was carried by fads or the magnetic personalities of the star – Total Recall is one that leaps from the top of my head; how is Colin Farrell even a shade of Arnold Schwarzenegger for audience draw?! Campy staples from the 80s are being remade with actual gravitas (there's a new RoboCop coming down the pipe...I WON'T buy that for a dollar!) and period-relevant fare like Red Dawn are being clumsily regurgitated to play off 21st century fears...of North Korea.  Oh, but not the North Korea, but rather a North Korean splinter group. Ah, the splinter group...the silver bullet in the American political correctness arsenal. And the terrifying thing is that we're still in the beta testing phase of this New World Order. In another decade or two what we're seeing on screens now could be thought of as only the vanguard of the Age of Rehashed Shit.

Superhero movies are the new bread and butter, of course. I'm not the first writer to take note of that; I'm merely the sexiest. Everyone loves a good comic book movie now that the land has been tilled enough times. Sure it was nervous days for 20^th Century Fox when they greenlit the original X-Men, and the first Spider-Man was probably shakier ground still, considering how much it cost in the long-long ago of 2002 dollars. But now that those trailblazers have cleared the path, it's open season on spandex. Hugh Jackman, an unknown in the states at the turn of the millennium, will be appearing for the SIXTH time as Wolverine this summer in The Wolverine, a NutraSweet version of the Claremont/Miller miniseries, to be followed in short order by Number Seven when Days of Future Past arrives next year. I'm happy for him; he's found a niche and done well with it.

And Spider-Man? Oh, ho hooo, he pulled the real hat trick, didn't he? Yes, the Webbed Wonder grunted out an All-Different, Totally Fresh, Newly Relevant, Completely Updated franchise reboot a scant decade after Tobey Maguire (who's either 38 or dead by now, I can't recall) first suffered for his art by cinching his genitals into the familiar red-'n-blue unitard. For those of you who missed The Amazing Spider-Man, you can simulate the experience by watching the '02 Maguire movie on mute and substituting Andrew Garfield's stammering dialogue with a track of Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man. It wasn't bad, I just liked it a lot better ten years ago.

I'm lying. It was much, much worse than the one ten years ago and I didn't like it at all. Ha!

But this will be a trend for the foreseeable future: hero flicks on the Decade Standard: three movies in ten years, followed by a 18-24 month cool down, followed by a reboot that will simply tell the same tale again with cursory and largely cosmetic changes, helmed by some pliant film school schlub who will do what he's told and peopled entirely with Hot Young Things looking to buy their first mansion. Why? Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.

If it comes to that. For there are already some cracks in the foundation. Some, I'll admit, are only theoretical at this point, but the writing is on the wall. Audiences are not exactly as stupid as the studios seem to think they are, and I predict that John and Jane Theatergoer are going to tire of this trend before it becomes the norm. The hope, for now, comes from behind the lens.

There is already a schism amongst filmmakers, many of whom seem perturbed by the new culture of franchise-worship, and others who are obviously torn over which side of the fight they're on. Box office gods Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have turned into oracles, predicting a future of $50 movie tickets and envisioning scenarios where a single misfire – one big-budget flop – will checkmate an entire studio and bring it to ruin. Spielberg pointed to the success of NetFlix original programming as an indicator that moviemakers and their audiences will soon be looking for more economical ways to both make and enjoy quality efforts that don't involve leaving home or laying out an Alex Hamilton for a small popcorn (perhaps even more terrifying, he suggested his stellar period piece Lincoln almost didn't get made out of fear that the multi-Oscar winning drama wouldn't be enough of a draw).

Steven Soderbergh has likewise publicly decried the new studio philosophy, noting that most suits won't touch a property that isn't guaranteed to make up its $100 million-plus budget OR cheaper fare that would not contribute to the year-end review in any meaningful way. Introspective character pieces? Experimental cinema? Can't be done. Soderbergh has sworn off making any more Hollywood pictures.

The Wachowskis went independent for last year's Cloud Atlas and undertook the most herculean effort to date to produce a super-budget picture without major studio support (though shot in English, it is technically considered a German movie). Without knowing the history of the production I can only speculate – but it's an educated speculation – that part or all of the reason they did this was because the film was 'high-concept' sci-fi that didn't spoon-feed answers to the audience. You know, the kind of movie that makes the accountants and business majors in the studio throne rooms feel dumb. Whatever your opinion of the film might be – I happened to like it – Lana and Andy did what they set out to do, and if they had to cut corners to make it work I can't see where they might have done so (with the possible exception of their labor force – if you haven't seen it, Cloud Atlas was done with an ensemble cast with each actor playing as many as six separate roles). The tragedy there is that the film barely recovered its shooting budget and is widely – if unfairly – considered a flop. Had it actually cleaned up at the box office it might have gone a long way to assuage the jittery suits who don't trust – have never trusted – intelligent sci-fi/speculative pieces. Alas, it was not to be, and the fight goes on.

Then, of course, there's cinema's current Neville Chamberlain, Peter Jackson. My gut impression of the world's Only Living Hobbit is that he rather could have done without the decree from on high that his return to Middle-Earth be elongated from two films to three. Doing so, to read some history on the subject, apparently required a great deal of scheduling callisthenics and no small amount of cajoling his cast to stick around for the many more months required to turn Tolkien's barely 300-plus page book into a trilogy. Now, as I already observed in a post back in January, Mr. Jackson clearly made the best of the situation and ended up having considerable fun, too, as these films clock in a three hours apiece and are aswim with whimsical minutiae and gooey fanboy esoterica. But in the end doesn't it just sort of feel like a cash grab? Here was New Line, after all, many times rescued from the dungheap of failed studios themselves, with a crew already in place (in New Zealand, no less, where you just can't get to from here), make-uped and costumed to a fair thee well, sitting on the closest thing to a real life dwarf horde of guaranteed ticket sales...tempting, no? I'm not inclined to point any fingers at Jackson and company and perhaps comparing him to history's greatest sniveling collaborator is too much. But considering Wing Nut Productions had to spend nearly a decade shopping around for ANY studio willing to produce the original LOTR films, it's telling that a dozen years later the powers that be couldn't wait to crank the dials to 11 on more twee men and their twee swords.

Now, will these strained and disparate points-of-view carry over to the moviegoing public? I think yes. Movies and politics have the same fundamental problem: you can't fool all the people all the time. Even casual viewers are remarking that films all seem the same these days, and art houses and foreign flicks are doing banner business even here in the heathen States. However, I think as long as the world continues to be twice as stupid and ten times as fucked as the most confounding fantasy we can throw into a projector, people will still pay money for what's put in front of them. But will it ever be enough?

The franchise will have its time in the sun and, like the Byzantines or the Hittites, will likely be remembered for the good things and its abuses glossed over. Things change, and not always for the worse. But when next you emerge from the darkened womb of your nearest IMAX with your wallet twenty dollars lighter and the horrors of the All New, All Different Highlander still reverberating through your brain, don't claim you were never warned.