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| The Batsuit of The Dark Knight, worn by Christian Bale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Forgive my pedantry here, but there are feature film Remakes,
feature film Re-Adaptations of non-feature film material and – the subject of
this article - Reboots. When I read lists of good or bad remakes I often see a
mishmash of these three and yet each is quite different. Remakes are films that
make a clear attempt to produce a new version of a single film. A re-adaptation,
in the context of this article, describes a second or subsequent adaptation of
a novel, a play, video game or some other non-feature film source material. A
movie reboot occurs when an established franchise of films starts anew. The
overwhelming majority of reboots will start with a remake or a re-adaption, but
the motive of the producers is to refresh an established franchise anew,
disregarding previous continuities. A good reboot meets the torturous task of
doing justice to the core “spirit” of the original work with obvious respect whilst
laying believable foundations for the rest of the series. A bad reboot does the
complete opposite. Therefore, the purpose of this frivolous and unashamedly
geeky article is to put forward my favourite and least favourite attempts to refresh
a movie franchise.
