A few years ago it was remakes. Then it was prequels. Last year it was “re-imaginings”. Now, Hollywood’s hot new buzzword for doing the same thing over and over again is “reboot”, and I’m not talking about the old Saturday morning computer animated cartoon.
The thing that makes reboots even worse than the usual bullshit of prequels, remakes, and re-imaginings though, is that they don’t even let the body get cold before they drag it out of the morgue and start raping it. Hulk for instance is getting a reboot. That means they are too lazy to make a sequel so they’re just going to do it all over again. That’s right… too lazy to make a sequel, probably the most lazy form of filmmaking there is next to a shot by shot remake (which thankfully Psycho killed forever). When you’re doing a reboot, it means that you think it’s too much trouble to take someone else’s idea and expand on it. You’re too lame and untalented even to build on someone else’s talent. In fact, you can’t even be troubled to watch something older than five minutes ago to rip off. Instead, you’re grabbing the first thing you see off the first run shelf at Blockbuster and heading back to work to take what they did and do it over again. The galling thing is that you think the people who watched it before are so stupid that they’ll have forgotten about the other movie in the year or two since it hits theaters and be happy to plunk down money all over again. Reboots make me sick, but what makes me sicker is the certain knowledge that people really are that stupid and it will almost certainly work.
The latest bag of reboot vomit may end up being Blade. The guys over at Bloody-Disgusting claim that’s what’s in the works. Personally, I think all these rumored reboots are only going to happen if the Hulk reboot is a success, which means that if you want to cut the head off this snake add Edward Norton’s too-soon Hulk redo to your boycott list. If it’s a hit, expect reboots of everything from Spider-Man to Blade flooding theaters within the next couple of years. Hollywood’s writers and actors are threatening to strike, I wonder what happens if their audiences stage one?
