Dear Hollywood,
I know you filmmakers live the good life as directors, producers and so on, and living the good life lets you get kind of lazy, but what happened to your work ethic? What happened to your drive and sense of nuance? It’s totally acceptable to reboot a TV series into a movie like they did with Mission Impossible and the Fugitive, that requires some artistic and creative license, but taking a movie series and erasing all previous continuity… ? Come on.
I know it hasn’t always been a bad idea; the new Batman movies and all the James Bond movies with Daniel Craig are awesome and did quite well at the box office. Quite possibly the only real stand out, as both a trendsetter and innovator in the reboot area, is Star Trek. Using comedy actors in an action movie, why didn’t Hollywood think of that sooner? Everyone got tired of seeing burnt out, second rate, B-movie actors mumbling their way through tone deaf acting and cliché lines. Now John Cho and Simon Pegg on the other hand, they can deliver a line and make you feel like inflamed modern theater prices aren’t so bad after all.
As for “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th” and “The Pink Panther”… are they even trying anymore? Movies shouldn’t be manufactured ready to roll off an assembly line like that. Don’t get me wrong, in the land of free enterprise, adrenaline junkies are a big market and top dog in that field gets borderline worship, like Rob Zombie with “Halloween,” but then they tried to fill the shoes that only Peter Sellers could with a reboot of “The Pink Panther.” Maybe you wouldn’t call this the abomination of a classic, but its damn close.
“The Incredible Hulk” was rebooted after one film. They should have given it some time, and I know the first one was terrible but you can’t just establish a new back story before the first one even has a sequel.
“The Fantastic Four” is already scheduled to be rebooted as well. Reboots in and of themselves don’t really seem like a problem in comparison to these immediate reboots.
If you’re constantly wiping the slate clean, how do you keep track of a series or decide which version of a series to follow? This is what will happen when the contemporary is constantly being redone, it loses any shot at permanency, automatically discarding anything the preceded it.
Rebooting TV shows to be shown on TV is almost as low; luckily no one has done that yet. “Knight Rider” continued with it story and “American Gladiators”, well, that’s just NBC flopping around like a beached flounder trying to get viewers. Is it too much to ask of you Hollywood to have an original thought?
I thought this was America, land of entertainment an amusement. Have you run out of steam to fuel our quintessential characteristic?
So get it together you guys, put down the caviar, unplug the Brookstone massage chair, stop waxing your Ferrari three times a week and get something fresh on the silver screen.
Sincerely yours,
Ashton Cermak