3. The Re-quel
Description: So imagine you have a rather successful series. Successful enough that you have multiple entries spanning years, decades even. Unfortunately a side effect of such success is the Law of Diminishing Returns, wherein you lose some of that spark every time you put a new film out. Now, depending on your series' rate of decay, your mileage will vary. You might get two or three good sequels out, four if you're lucky. But ultimately by time you get to entry five, the odds are not going to be in your favor. Somehow though, you have a lot of good will from those initial installments. Some would continue to sequelize, and some would prefer to take a break and reboot the series for maximum freshness. What if we did both, so that we could regain the spark from the beginning, but at the same time we'd be progressing forward into parts unknown? If this sounds good to you, then you're ready to ride the Re-quel (Reboot/Sequel) Rails!
The Right Way:Reboots are like naval battles: you need a good strategy, a thick hull, and some solid conceptual bearings to keep things afloat. Making everything old new again is hard enough as it is, but somehow continuing your franchise is a real pain. That said, it isn't a bad idea to revisit the past through some sort of storytelling device that lets you do so, but in a different way. In other words, it'd be best if you could find a story device that could reset the clock on the series, but at the same time give you a new way to tell similar stories to the ones we've seen before. Old and new mix like Peanut Butter and Chocolate.
(Example: Star Trek '09. Star Trek '09 was lucky in the respect that it's a Science Fiction story and Time Travel could be easily employed. By going back to the beginning of the whole franchise, we can tell new stories with a new cast and new designs/locales. However, the added bonus was that with the use of Time Travel, Spock Prime could cross over into the Prequel with knowledge from the Sequels and truly meld the two into a proper Re-quel. He reminds us of how things were back in the previous timeline, but also remarks on how someone else with that knowledge is screwing things up and creating an alternate timeline. Hello Re-quel and hello new stream of sequels!)The Wrong Way:Unfortunately, not everyone has a valid storytelling excuse to use in order to justify proceeding with a Re-quel. This especially applies to films more grounded in reality, as it's really hard to re-tell events from your own past with new places, persons, and details. You can lie about wearing a green hoodie with your red headed girlfriend and getting into a fight with your best friend's father, but it doesn't mean it replaces the actuality of being in that fight with your science professor and having a blond girlfriend instead. Though if you're feeling particularly lazy, you could always say it was your nephew.
(Example: Shaft '00. What happens when a Black Private Dick stops being a sex machine to all the chicks? He hands the badge and the legacy down to his nephew to carry on as if he hadn't missed a beat. Shaft expected its audience to come back to the series and instead of watching Richard Roundtree kick all sorts of doors in, we'd be watching Samuel L. Jackson doing so in a more modern setting. This might have worked, if it wasn't for the fact that Shaft still exists. Shaft is still alive and well, yet we're supposed to buy that his nephew will be taking up his shtick in the Aughts, in which case we'd have been better off creating a new character and hinting that they were related. In the long run, hint that you're related or start over fresh, because someone like Shaft is a hard act to live up to. To even try without the least bit of effort involved is just being one lazy mother...)