Sequels, prequels and reboots oh my: the rise of the new Hollywood business model

Sorry, super dudes, Hollywood thinks you're beach ballin'.

In recent months it’s been announced that a number of popular movie brands are getting what is now widely known as the “reboot” treatment. Spiderman, Superman and Bourne . Zodiac scribe, James Vanderbilt, is writing the next two Spidey films, which I’m thinking can’t really be that much fun, but what do I know. Who needs fun when you’ve got a hundred grand a week? Raimi and Toby are out, giving the studio the opportunity they needed to start over. Next! Your Spidey vision is so yesterday, old man. We want a Spidey vision that’s like totally right now. New blood. New money. Meanwhile it seems that both Greengrass and Damon are out of the Bourne franchise, so I can’t imagine it will take the studio long to actualize, as they say, to concretize, this same bold new opportunity with their popular unkillable spy property.

This is not a trend, ladies and gentlemen. This is not a fad. It’s time to stop wishing it would end. To stop hoping we’ll wake up, in Kansas, friends and family around our bed. Please open your mouth and let out the collective breath you’ve been holding. This is the new Hollywood business model, and it’s time we accepted it. Frankly I’m shocked, shocked that it’s taken them this long to embrace this reboot idea as aggressively as they have. If the reboot idea were a woman on a park bench there’d be some serious PDA about now. Someone would probably call the cops. There would likely be a televised rape trial. O.J. would show up in ill-fitting gloves claiming innocence. But ultimately Hollywood would prevail. Hollywood would walk, into the glorious sunset (a rear screen projection), to reboot another day.

Lamenting the loss of creative integrity among Hollywood types is a popular pastime. Committing this lament to film is a sub-genre, with movies or books like The Player, What Just Happened, Living in Oblivion, Southland Tales (my addition) and What Makes Sammy Run dramatizing, often hilariously, the soullessness of the sun-speckled coast.

The news is not good, my friends. The reboot is taking over. It’s spreading, like a virus, or a hungry blob from space. I haven’t counted, but I imagine that the majority of the films made by Hollywood in 2010 will be new versions of preexisting projects, some very old, some hardly out of theaters. It’s recently been announced that:

Robert Downey Jr. will play the Vampire Lestat in a new Interview With the Vampire. Buh-bye Mr. Cruise (who am I kidding? He’s probably producing. He’ll probably have a cameo). There are 11 books in this series, so consider this Downey Jr.’s second (or is that “third”?) franchise.

The hardworking ga-zillionaire Steven Spielberg will remake Harvey. He will also develop a film based on the video game Halo. He will also make a fifth Indiana Jones (funny, I distinctly heard the nails that the forth film pounded into Indy’s coffin). He will also make, in addition to the Tin Tin movie in post-production, two more. The first isn’t even out yet and it’s already a trilogy. This is also the new way. Why go to all the trouble making one ginormous predestined blockbuster when you can make three? Or four? On that note, Cameron’s pushing full steam ahead with more Avatars. These are just a few of the twenty-six projects Steven Spielberg has in development in one form or another. And that’s just what’s been announced. This guy’s insatiable.

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A forth Mad Max is coming, possibly starring Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner. The only good news about that is A) It won’t star Mel Gibson, so B) It won’t be about running down Jews in the road and C) It will be made by the series originator, George Miller, so it might actually be good (though I recently re-watched The Road Warrior and am sorry to report that it doesn’t hold up. Mad Max, on the other hand, still does. Go figure).

There will be another Hancock, another Wanted, another Batman, another Descent, another Rambo, another Bad Boys, another Halloween, without Rob Zombie and in 3D. Heads will roll… into your popcorn. Duck, sucker. Instead of another Halloween, Rob Zombie will remake The Blob. In the original film (a campy classic which nevertheless starred Steve McQueen), the blob in question basically slid along Main Street U.S.A. absorbing the slow or the fallen. We can expect a very different otherworldly mass in Zombie’s take.

There will be remakes of Dirty Dancing, Outland, Barbarella, Excalibur, and pretty much every other film you’ve ever loved at one time or other.

Nothing But the Truth filmmaker (anybody see that?), Rod Lurie will make an undoubtedly turgid (if Truth is any indication) new version of Sam Peckinpah’s classic, Straw Dogs.

The producers of the Saw franchise will continue to make a new Saw film every year until the end of time. Good news! The fact that a new Saw movie comes out every single year is actually speeding the arrival of the end of time. According to scientists, the world will now end sometime around Saw 14.

Leonardo DiCaprio is developing a “Gothic” take on the classic Little Red Riding Hood tale. Leo of course is too young to realize that this has of course already been done. It was called The Company of Wolves, and it was directed by Neil Jordan, and it was good. But that’s old news! And old news is lame and boring. Twilight’s Catherine Hardwick will direct this new flick, which she’s calling a “werewolf movie.” Of course she is. She’s largely responsible for all the vampire posters adorning our adolescents’ bedroom walls. If anyone can succeed where Joe Johnston (The Wolf Man) failed it is surely Ms. Hardwick, whose meandering ADHD vision is the perfect fit for our iPhone-addicted youth. Maybe her wolves won’t actually bite; they’ll just lick and sniff. Hot. Only their palms will be hairy.

Two of J.J. Abrams’s TV writers are scripting MI:4. Why? Because, despite not a single one of the three films made so far being very good, the thing makes money. One billion, four hundred thousand and counting. From this alone, since his points guarantee him around 20% of profits, Tom Cruise has netted a hundred and fifty million. I bet you a hundred and fifty million bucks that plans are already underway to reboot this series after number four, with a new young stud taking Tom’s place, and Tom exec producing another four flicks. Why settle for a hundred and fifty million bucks when you could have half a billion?

Before the ammonium nitrate has even dried on Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood film, it’s been announced that a futuristic take on the tale is in the works. Set in a dystopian London, I’m picturing The Tudors meets Mad Max.

Because enough schmucks went to see G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra (it’s global take is north of $300 million) we’ll have another one of them soon.

Red Dawn, the reboot brought to us by the hardworking Tom Cruise (his kid’s in it) will come out this year. Tough guy John Milius, currently writing the hell out of Rome, would be pissed if it didn’t mean a check in his mailbox big enough to buy a second home.

They’re remaking The Wizard of Oz, in 3D of course. Expect fast food tie-ins. “This Christmas, follow the yellow brick road… to Burger King!” Cut to: Linsday Lohan’s doe-eyed Dorothy. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Every purchase of a Whopper Jr. (at participating restaurants) comes with a totally Oz-some action figure. Collect all 10 without dying from a heart attack and you win a cameo in the sequel! Sweet.

Iron Man, despite the fact that the first one was actually pretty good, as popcorn flicks go, has slipped quietly into full-fledged franchise mode and will, undoubtedly, keep on truckin’ for three more films before itself getting a “reboot” and starting over sometime towards the end of the decade with a new star and filmmaker. Downey Jr. will exec produce and earn enough money to buy Afghanistan. Too bad he’s off heroin. Quartets are the new trilogies. Of course, James Ellroy knew this before anybody.

Wolverine 2 is being made, despite Wolverine 1. Maybe The Usual Suspects scribe Christopher McQuarrie will actually make it watchable.

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Cover of Death Race 2000 [Region 2

What they’re calling a “prequel” to Death Race 2000 is in the works. Come on. Prequel, sequel, let’s just accept the language at hand. “Reboot” is actually the proper terminology for what’s happening in our brave new era. It is truly the most apt, if you think about it. This new Death Race movie isn’t going to take place before the old Death Race movies (the first being a cheap Roger Corman flick starring a young Sylvester Stallone). It’s not going to follow the adventures of these Death Race drivers when, say, they were young mechanics cutting auto shop class to smoke reefer behind the gym and share their pot-fueled dreams of one day drivin’ in the big leagues. “I’ve always wanted to run down some cripples with my Charger. That’s why I put the blown hemi in it in the first place, man.” They won’t take the death or the race out of a product called Death Race. It’s not a prequel.

So let’s just call it what it is. It’s another version. It’s an alternate take. It’s somebody else’s vision, if we can use that word to describe what this is. A reboot is what you do when your computer freezes up. It’s what you do to get your shit working again. It’s a way to reset the clock, to start over. The funny thing is, it’s not these films, these brands, that are beach-balling, it’s Hollywood’s collective creative mind. Too bad we can’t power cycle that sucker.