10 Upcoming Sequels And Reboots That Will Destroy Your Faith In Cinema

The Magnificent Seven with Cam Gigandet? Sounds awesome!

Ghostbusters 2016
Sony Pictures

According to William Goldman, who won Oscars for writing Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and All The President’s Men, there are three types of movies: those that aspire to quality and succeed, those that aspire to quality and fail, and those that were never meant to be any good at all.

The last group, Goldman claims, comprises “movies for which the pulse was either totally or primarily financial: rip-offs, spin-offs, sequels etc.” In other words, most of today’s pictures are about as creative and well intentioned as Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

Executives that talk about rebooting this or reimagining that sound like Eskimos describing snow, using multiple words to describe the same thing. In the end, they only require two – ‘cash’ and ‘grab’.

There have, of course, always been sequels and remakes, and the world would be a poorer place without The Bride Of Frankenstein (sequel), The Maltese Falcon (remake) or The Magnificent Seven (technically a remake). Then again, most contemporary directors aren’t James Whale, John Huston or John Sturges.

Most contemporary directors graduate from either commercials or rock videos and are selected for their fully-formed visual style – studios want to know what their product is going to look like, after all. They just don’t have an instinctive grasp of storytelling – not that it matters if you’ve been hired by Michael Bay to rework The Hitcher for a modern crowd.

The following movies may very well knock the world off its axis...

10. Hitman: Agent 47

Ghostbusters 2016
20th Century Fox

Hitman: Agent 47 is a reboot of Xavier Gens’s Hitman, the 2007 movie that starred Timothy Olyphant as a bald gun-for-hire on the run from the Russian military. It was based on a video game series developed by IO Interactive, so the intentions of the filmmakers were clear.

Gens complained that the studio wasn’t interested in his original ideas and just wanted a movie in the Jason Bourne mould, which is ironic as Agent 47’s trailer makes it clear that Fox are targeting a new audience - the comic book fans. There’s a genetically engineered hero (played by Homeland’s Rupert Friend) who’s capable of taking out his adversaries with bombs, helicopters and some astonishingly athletic gunplay and… well, let’s not get bogged down in plot.

When it comes to movies about killers with abnormal speed, intelligence and strength, Wanted did that whole yarn back in 2008, so we’re sure the casting of Thomas Kretschmann (who played James McAvoy’s father in that film) as one of Agent 47’s villains is just a coincidence.  

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Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'