10 Dumbest Movie Reboots Ever

So bad that you're losing brain cells because of them.

The Mummy
Universal

Somewhere along the way in Hollywood, a producer who was clearly tired of having to look for new content to put out stumbled upon an idea that he must have thought was absolutely ingenious at the time. Reboots.

Though the term has really only garnered wide-scale popularity and use over the course of the last decade or so, let's be honest here, it is just a fancier word for remake. Audiences grew tired and weary of remakes during the 2000's, so what did those sharp-witted producers do?

They started calling them reboots and the vast majority of audiences were none-the-wiser. It allowed studios to simply recycle the same characters and ideas and claim that they were putting an all-new spin on the original material.

Got a long-dormant IP just wasting away on a shelf? Make a reboot. Did your franchise's last couple of films really suck and now audiences don't want to see those films anymore? Make a reboot. Do you want to stop having to pay the increasingly-large paychecks of your franchise's established cast? Make a reboot.

While there have certainly been some great reboots made (Star Tek and Rise of the Planet of the Apes for instance), the vast majority of them are just idiotic. It's the result of a studio lazily rehashing the same old idea and hoping that audiences will continue to lap it up. These are the worst offenders.

10. The Mummy (2017)

The Mummy
Universal

The popular consensus on this reboot was, 'why are they remaking those Brendan Frasier films?'.

Well, folks, the Frasier films were already remakes, to begin with. But where those films at least took the franchise somewhere with something vaguely resembling a plan, Kurtzman and Cruise's film has absolutely no idea what it is trying to do from one minute to the next. In fact, it is so poorly shot, edited, and written that it's hard to even really classify it as a film.

Instead, it is essentially a forty-minute long Syfy TV special that has been stretched to feature length.

This is evident in the film's reuse of footage (it uses the exact same shot of slow-motion sparks that opens the film a grand total of six times throughout), in its retreading of plot points that have already been covered in this film (we get the Mummy's backstory footage not once, not twice, but four different times), and in the ideas it blatantly steals from much better films (An American Werewolf In London's decaying dead best friend, the face in the sand storm from the Frasier films, and even having the balls to drop The Bride of Frankenstein's most famous line).

Universal wanted this to kick off a Dark Universe and was so dead-set on it that they even chuck an opening logo in there for it. Maybe next time, check the quality of said film before quite literally betting the farm on it.

Contributor
Contributor

A film enthusiast and writer, who'll explain to you why Jingle All The Way is a classic any day of the week.