niamhburns
Over the last few years I’ve noticed a major trend taking off in the film industry, a trend that has completely ballooned beyond belief. I’m talking about Hollywood rebooting, reviving, remaking and adding sequels to films of yesteryear. Whatever happened to having originality? Has writing an authentic piece of screenplay gone out of style? Is Hollywood lacking ideas or have they really hit rock bottom?
It was revealed today that Warner Bros are apparently in talks to reboot the cult-classic film the The Shining, 32 years after Jack Nicholson stunned audiences portraying the role of Jack Torrance. To be frank, I don’t think it’s a good idea Hollywood rebooting such an iconic and well-known film. Can anyone really play the leading part as good as Jack Nicholson once did? But of course, the same thing was said about the role of the Joker in Batman. When Heath Ledger played the part of the Joker in The Dark Knight he stunned audiences with his stellar performance and proved his critics wrong. Athough I do think some films should be off limits to reboots, especially thosethat were perfectly fine in the first place and are universally untouchable.
Rebooting films is bad enough but when a studio persists to release sequels to films that aren’t really needed, it can get boring, stale and predictable. How many Ice Age films are we on now? 4? That’s far too many to have in my opinion. OK so the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean was perfectly fine, in fact I enjoyed it. Although the third (and hopefully final) instalment to the franchise lacked sparkle and that edge the two films before it possessed. The same can be said about those Narnia films, the first film in the series was the best, without a doubt. The rest were just, a bit, well bleugh. But the worst, the worst offender in my list has to be Transformers. The first film was bad enough, then came the brainless sequel that was so bad it hurt. And then to make matters worse, the makers thought it was a brilliant idea to release an even more brain-numbing third film. I was dragged to go see that film, 3 hours of my life that I will never, ever get back. Don’t get me wrong, some sequels to films are fantastic, take the Dark Knight. Possibly the only film that outshone it’s predecessor, it was so much better than Batman Begins in so many ways.
In the future, we can look forward to the reboots of the following films: The Great Gatsby (I’m not complaining about this at all, in fact it’s one of my most anticipated films of this year), Dirty Dancing, The Wizard of Oz, Superman: Man of Steel, Tomb Raider, Mad Max, Carrie , The Body Guard, Total Recall, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and American Psycho (this should be left well alone!)
So what do you think of it all? Do you think its time that Hollywood stopped with the constant sequels and reboots? Is it time to write original movies in the 21st century and come up with new ideas?