How do you all feel about the recent-ish trend of creating sequels to 20+ year old movies like Halloween, Terminator and Dumb and Dumber?

I think the only one I've liked at all was the first Jurassic World. It was almost more like a remake, redoing the park concept but in a "what if it actually worked ... for a while" sort of way. I think that worked really well. And it didn't try bringing back any of the old actors as geriatric versions of the same characters (until the most recent one, at least).

Even the few stupid things it did I think you could make an argument for, namely the Indominus Rex. I hate that they didn't stick to actual dinosaurs, and I think it would have been cool if they retconned them to look more like how we now know dinosaurs probably looked. (Raptors with feathers can be cool! Trust me!) But I did think it was clever how they acknowledged that even the old movies' dinos were inaccurate because they had to repair the DNA and engineered the dinos to look how we thought they looked at the time. So the concept of them all being genetic monsters instead of real dinosaurs was kind of cool to explore in one movie and justified the Indominus Rex's inclusion. But then the series went all in on the genetic monsters instead of just giving us cool dinosaurs. Fallen Kingdom focusing on the indoraptor and human cloning was so bad that I didn't even give Dominion and its giant locusts a chance. I just want to see dinosaurs, dammit!

Back on topic, when the movie is more of a reimagining or soft reboot, I think it works okay. But when they do a direct sequel with all of the actors now old like Indiana Jones or the Star Wars prequel trilogy, or when they retcon out any of the less popular movies like Halloween, I have been really hating it. At least Terminator: Dark Fate had an in-universe way of explaining how the other movies didn't happen. But I actually like a lot of the "bad" movies that they're trying to write out of existence so that puts these new sequels on instantly shaky ground with me.

As far as just bringing back old actors, I'll only give a pass on that to Bill and Ted Face The Music. It's not as good as the first two, and it doesn't justify its existence beyond being a nostalgic throwback, but I enjoyed that throwback enough. It was charming and made me smile.

In 1966, one of my favorite teachers in school said, "people who wallow in the past possess an immature mind". So here I am in 2023 repeating to everyone I know, "I want to remember the past, not relive it".

I now realize that it's not the fault of the audience or franchise fans. It's the big studios and production companies that see money in telling the same stories, over and over.

As a boy growing up in the 1960's I enjoyed all the magazine articles and TV shows predicting the 21st century. No one could have imagined the awful people heading major production companies in the entertainment industry. Greedy people who only know how to make money selling the same story again, and again.

This horrible cycle of "sequels/reboots/prequels/remakes" must come to an end. Otherwise one day this generation will see "2060" on a calendar, and realize they wasted the best of their lives reliving the 20th century.

eddstarr wrote :

 

This horrible cycle of "sequels/reboots/prequels/remakes" must come to an end. Otherwise one day this generation will see "2060" on a calendar, and realize they wasted the best of their lives reliving the 20th century.

 

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For some reason this reminded me of that stupid new song that has the exact same tune as "Blue" by Eiffel 65. As soon as I heard it, I knew that we'd have an entire generation of people singing the wrong words to "Blue".

I guess the way it's relevant is it shows how the people producing mass media are so focused on remixing nostalgia because they think it's what sells, but they do so without realizing that they're making it way worse. Even if they create something that newer generations who didn't experience the original might like, and might initially suck in nostalgic audiences, they've isolated fans of the original and complicated their relationships to it.

I can typically separate my love for something from a bad sequel that other people claim "ruins" the original. Like the people who say the Star Wars sequels/prequels ruined the original movies, I never thought like that. I can enjoy the original thing and keep it isolated from all of the awful follow-ups. But it does make it so I can't get as excited about any new stories taking place in the same continuity as the new things.

Star Trek Discovery is a good example of this. I love Trek, but I hate Discovery (and to a lesser extent Picard). Please don't get me wrong, though. I'm not one of those people who complain that Star Trek has gone "woke" because Discovery has a black female lead. Those people are stupid. Star Trek has always been progressive and ahead of its time on social issues.

I was really excited when they announced Star Trek was coming back, but what bugs me is that the new Trek canon is so pessimistic about the future and that's not what Star Trek ever was to me. Suddenly all of Starfleet is basically as bad as Section 31 and the gubbermint is the baddies and the memes about Starfleet being fascist are actually being taken seriously by the writers. All of that is what they gave us instead of the utopic vision of a galaxy unified by common ideals that Star Trek was always about. Yeah, nu-Trek mirrors real life in its pessimism and social issues, but Star Trek was never supposed to show how bad our world is right now. It was supposed to show us what we can aspire to.

Thankfully we now have Strange New Worlds which finally feels like a return to classic Trek, and it looks like Paramount wisened up and are totally ditching the awful Discovery redesign of the Klingons. But now when there's a new Star Trek-adjacent thing announced, I can't get immediately exicted for it because I know it could easily go back to being like Discovery.

Rocky is a great example.

I would rather see something new on the big screen and on TV. That isn't to say that there aren't properties out there that I wouldn't mind revisiting again, even decades later. The problem is that Hollywood is almost incapable of doing it right. And they've steadily gotten worse at it. They can't seem to revisit a legacy character now without first deconstructing him/her, which essentially takes all of their previous progress and growth and destroys it. It's the stupidest tactic in all of movie making. It's lazy and juvenile. The only film I can think of in recent times that didn't resort to that tactic is Top Gun: Maverick.