6 Movie Franchises That Were Saved By A Reboot (And 6 That Were Doomed)
When in doubt, reboot.
Accusations have been leveled at the Hollywood studio system for years about a lack of originality, and it isn't as if they're unfounded. Out of the 39 movies to date that have earned over a billion dollars at the box office, only one of them is an original property. And even at that, Avatar has taken more than its fair share of criticism over the years about just how 'original' it really is.
It seems as though we're stuck in a never-ending cycle of mediocre franchise movies, and have been for quite some time. If a movie is a success, it launches a franchise and the audiences gets bombarded with sequels. If it fails, just wait a few years and it'll get rebooted anyway. If it fails again, then maybe it becomes a TV show. Or it gets rebooted once more somewhere down the line, and so the cycle continues.
This year has already seen Hellboy and Men in Black International fail spectacularly, but on the other side of the coin the decidedly 'meh' Aladdin has made over $800m to date, and it would be fair to assume that the upcoming Lion King stands to make a hell of a lot more.
When it comes to reboots, they have the potential to either breathe new life into a struggling franchise or kill it entirely. The only thing for certain is that they're not going away anytime soon.
12. Doomed: Jack Ryan
Jack Ryan is a character we've become accustomed to seeing recast every few years, with most people in agreement that either Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford play the definitive cinematic version of Tom Clancy's CIA analyst. It would be incredibly surprising and a little troubling if anybody claimed Chris Pine made the best Jack Ryan, given how instantly forgettable his performance was in Shadow Recruit.
A thriller with very little in the way of thrills and one of those movies you often forgot even existed until you see it mentioned somewhere, Shadow Recruit is about as workmanlike as studio genre movies can get. Reboot and origin story? Check. Young, handsome man named Chris in the lead? Of course. Oscar-winning character actor lending support? Look, it's Kevin Costner. Respected director behind the camera and a British actor playing a foreign villain? Kenneth Branagh can do both!
A frustratingly paint-by-numbers spy flick, Shadow Recruit brought absolutely nothing new to the table at a time when Bourne and Bond had helped redefine what a big budget espionage thriller could be. True to fashion, both the reviews and box office were perfectly okay and nothing more, with Jack Ryan soon shunted off to television with John Krasinski the latest name to take up the mantle.