10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Failed)

Nostalgia has often been described as 'comfort food for the soul', making people forget about the present by remembering something good from the past. Over the last few years, nostalgia has become a massive part of modern popular culture in everything from books and music to TV shows and movies.

Like most things that people tend to enjoy, Hollywood has found a way to weaponize that feeling and market it to the masses.

If used correctly and in small doses, nostalgia can work. Leonard Nimoy brought some real gravitas to the rebooted Star Trek timeline, Judi Dench spent two decades keeping two different 007's in line, and the callbacks in the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy were subtle enough to go over the heads of a lot of people.

Not every updated version of a recognizable property needs to wink at the past in order to be a success. Christian Bale's Batman sure as sh*t didn't make a crack about not putting nipples on his costume. The vast majority of blockbusters these days feel the need to make overt and distracting references to the history of their franchise, and when the filmmakers lean on the nostalgia too heavily it can often end up hurting the movie.

Prometheus, Ridley Scott's technically-but-not-quite Alien movie, turned out to be hugely divisive. Some fans loved the detailed world-building and incredible production design, while others criticized it for being a little too grandiose and failing to fully explore or develop many of the lofty philosophical ideas hinted at in the script.

Regardless, it made $403.4m at the box office and in this day and age, that pretty much guarantees a sequel.

Perhaps sensing the backlash, the decision was made to abandon the majority of the story threads established in Prometheus in favor of steering things back towards more recognizable territory, with the 'Alien' prefix now added to the title and the iconic Xenomorphs brought back and placed front-and-center in the marketing to make things even clearer.

Covenant isn't a bad movie by any means, but it feels as though there was a studio-mandated checklist of things that had to be included to make it feel like an Alien movie, and instead of bringing anything new to the table these moments just trigger your nostalgia for the first two installments and remind you that you've seen all of this before.

Awkwardly bolting the franchise's existing mythology onto the lore established in Prometheus makes Alien: Covenant an incredibly uneven and over-familiar movie, and it ultimately only earned a little over half as much as its predecessor at the box office, leaving the future of the 40 year-old series up in the air yet again.