Arts & Culture

Why Are Movie Reboots So Successful?

In the first episode of the Apple TV series, “The Studio,” Seth Rogen plays a Hollywood studio boss tasked with making a box-office hit and prestige film about the Kool-Aid Man. He recruits director Martin Scorsese to make the movie, only for the Oscar-winning director to become intent on making a movie about Jonestown, the cult settlement in Guyana where followers took their own lives drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.

Jack Hamilton, left, and Sean Duncan both teach media studies at the University. (University Communications photos)

“The Studio” is meant as satire. But in a world where a horror movie about Winnie the Pooh and Piglet exists, it may not be far off.

This year, eight of the 10 top-grossing movies so far are sequels, adaptations or remakes, from “A Minecraft Movie” to “Lilo & Stitch” to “Final Destination: Bloodlines.” The 10 most commercially successful movies of 2024 were all based on pre-existing intellectual property, too.

“We have an existing fanbase, existing familiarity with a cinematic storytelling world, or with an IP, or, in the case of things like ‘Barbie,’ as a toy, and that is being very clearly capitalized upon,” said Sean Duncan, a University of Virginia assistant professor of media studies who teaches a course about film adaptations.

Familiarity practically guarantees an audience, he said. Adults who loved Disney cartoons as children are likely to buy tickets to see the latest live-action remake and bring along their own children.

“The movie industry tends to be really risk-averse,” Jack Hamilton, an associate professor of media studies at UVA, said. “Movies are expensive to make. Even a ‘lower budget’ movie will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, to make.”

Remakes, adaptations and sequels are a safer investment than original screenplays, and audiences continue to turn out in droves for the latest Marvel movie or “Mission: Impossible” sequel.

Changes to how viewers watch movies mean original films are even less financially viable. In the past, Duncan said, studios banked on recouping the cost of making a more niche movie with VHS and DVD purchases and rentals. Now, most people stream movies at home. Streaming services like Netflix essentially pay one fee to buy licenses to movies from studios, and the people behind those movies don’t make more money if their work takes off on a given platform.

Mid-budget movies, such as Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies, “Being John Malkovich” and bro-comedies like “Pineapple Express” and “The Hangover,” have also fallen out of favor at studios. Duncan said big movie studios used to have smaller indie studios within them that would produce such films, but those are no more. Even when a mid-budget movie gets a theatrical release, it is often quickly pushed out of theaters by a franchise film.

“(The indie studios were) an experiment from around the late ’90s through the early 2000s,” Duncan said. “Right around 2008, when ‘Iron Man’ is about to come out, they start shuttering a lot of these.”

Many recent reboots and adaptations have taken a darker, grittier tone; think of the 2015 “Fantastic Four” movie, or “Snow White and the Huntsman,” or the TV series “Riverdale.”

“Seeing the good guy with a lightsaber fighting the bad guy with a lightsaber seems pretty corny to most adults at this point, so twisting that can connect with things in our lives might give it a little bit more of an adult sheen,” Duncan said.

“The gritty reboot is so cliché at this point it’s almost a punchline,” Hamilton said. “But if you’re going to reboot something, optimally, you’ll have something new to do with it.”

Audiences have loved adaptations for a long time. One of Duncan’s favorite movies, “Rebecca” by director Alfred Hitchcock, is the film version of a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Reviewers, however, are less enamored with the current onslaught of remakes. Recent Disney remakes like “Lilo & Stitch” and “Snow White” have been flops with critics.

“There’s been such a glut of this stuff that I think critics are thinking, ‘I can’t believe I have to watch another ‘Ghostbusters’ movie,’” Hamilton said. “When you watch a bad version of one of these things, it feels very cynical. It feels like studio heads are saying, ‘Give these hogs their slop.’”

Hope is not lost for audiences looking for something fresh. Hamilton pointed to Disney’s recent decision to stop making live-action remakes of their earlier movies as a positive sign.

“They pulled the plug because people just don’t like them,” he said.

The recent success of “Sinners,” from “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler, is also cause for optimism for those who crave cinematic originality.

“There’s evidence that a well-executed original movie can still be really lucrative,” Hamilton said.